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LIBRARY OF PRINCETON 







MAY 30 2002 


THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 





Library of the Theological Seminary 









PRINCETON *® NEW JERSEY 


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Presented by 





Dr. Earl A. Pope 
Manson Professor of Bible 
Lafayette College 
The Earl A. Pope Collection 


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THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 
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HE ROOTS OF 
RELIGION IN 


THE HUMAN SOUL 
By JOTLN BAILLIE (<« ‘<« 


LIBRARY OF PRINCETON 








NEW YORK: 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


won 


First Published, 1926. 


Made and Printed in Great Britain by C. Tinling & Co., Ltd., 
Liverpool, London, and Prescot. 


MATRI DILECTISSIMAE 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/rootsofreligioni0Obail 


PREFACE 


Tuts little book consists of five lectures 
delivered last July before the Midsummer 
Conference for Ministers and Religious 
Workers at Union Theological Seminary, 
New York City. They were written for 
oral delivery rather than for publication ; 
but when, acceding to requests that had 
been made, I decided to publish them, I 
judged it best to leave them as they were. 
Apart from minor changes and corrections 
the first three lectures and the last are 
printed exactly as they were spoken. In 
the fourth lecture the two middle sections 
have been somewhat expanded with a 
view to securing my position against a 
type of criticism which, though not 
represented among my hearers, may very 
well be represented among my readers. 
One reason which has kept me from 
vii 


vill PREFACE 


attempting to recast and expand the whole 
is that I have for some time been con- 
templating the publication, possibly at no 
very distant date, of a larger work in which 
I hope to deal with some of the same 
problems, as well as with some other 
problems, in a more detailed and technical 
manner. 

My cordial thanks are due to the 
authorities of Union Theological Seminary 
and the officers of the Conference for their 
very courteous invitation and welcome ; 
to the original hearers of the lectures (a 
truly impressive company) for their too 
kind and forbearing reception of what I 
had to say; to my brother, the Reverend 
D. M. Baillie, M.A., of Cupar-Fife, Scotland, 
for his kindness and diligence in reading 
both manuscript and proofs and suggesting 
many most necessary corrections ; and to 
Professor J. Y. Campbell, M.A., of Wooster 
College, Ohio, for a similar generous service 
rendered in connection with the proofs at 
the eleventh hour. 

The foot-notes are strictly confined to 
references; but to two of the lectures I 


PREFACE ix 


have appended brief additional notes which 
deal in the main with points arising out 
of my brother’s criticisms. 

JOHN BAILLIE. 


AUBURN, NEW YORK, 
21st January, 1926. 







et 
ORL OS 


by Bat 





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CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 


foie) ) PRESENT, SITUATION. IN 


RELIGION: 


Il. WHAT RELIGION IS—SOME MIS- 


UNDERSTANDINGS 


III. WHAT RELIGION REALLY IS 


IV. WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 


V. HOW FAITH ARISES IN THE SOUL 


INDEX 


PAGE 


137 
205 


253 





CHATIPE RISE 
_ THE PRESENT SITUATION IN RELIGION 


I 


SOMETHING is happening to religion: some- 
thing new; something momentous. It is 
happening in our own time, under our 
very eyes, and there are not many of 
us who can feel that we have no part 
ftaaiiein it... 1 .jbelieve. that tothe 
historians of the future the second half 
of the nineteenth century and the first 
half of the twentieth will seem to have} : 
been one of the two or three most A betas 
critical periods in the whole history o 
religion in our Western World, and to | 
have witnessed a movement more epochal 
in character and further-reaching in its 


effects than even the Protestant 
I B 


2 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


Reformation. Of course, the first sporadic 
beginnings of this movement stretch far 
back into earlier chapters of our modern 
history, perhaps as far back as to the 
Renaissance and Reformation themselves ; 
but it is only in our own day that it has 
assumed such proportions as to affect the 
life of the people as a whole. 

It will be much easier for our children’s 
children than it is for any of ourselves to 
give a balanced and accurate characterisa- 
tion of the movement of which I am 
speaking, and indeed it has been claimed 
that the discussion of contemporary 
happenings partakes always more of the 
nature of gossip than of history. The 
trouble is, however, that if we put off the 
attempt to understand ourselves until such 
time as our understanding can be really 
complete and impartial, the time will have 
gone by when it can be of any practical 
benefit to us. Therefore I must be bold 


THE PRESENT SITUATION 3 


and, in this first chapter, do all I can to 
bring into clear relief in your minds the 
main features of the situation that is at 
present confronting the Christian Church. 

I propose, however, to simplify my task 
by calling to my help a certain body of 
literature which has hardly, as it seems to 
me, received quite the share of attention 
it deserves at the hands of the theologically- 
minded. I refer to the very considerable 
number of books and articles which were 
written during, or immediately after, the 
Great War about the religion of the men 
who were engaged in it. This literature 
owes its unusual significance to a variety 
of considerations. If, as in other wars, 
the armies had consisted of professional 
soldiers only, our interest in their religious 
life and ideas would be of a more limited 
kind, but in reality they were little less 
than the whole active manhood of our 
several nations dressed in military clothes : 


Fr) f 
} ALALY UDO, 3 Sf. oe sa - 


oe oi AN ny h kes bes 
/ 


4 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


as has been well said, before the War 
the “tommy” and the “ doughboy ” and 
the potlu were all called ‘“ the man in the 
street.” Not only, however, was the 
army’s religion the religion of the nation’s 
prime manhood, but it was the religion of 
that manhood when face to face with the 
most searching and testing experience that 
had come to it for long centuries. In 
their own vernacular, these men were “ up 
against it’’ as they had never been before. 
They were thrown back upon the roots of 
their being, and there was in consequence 
among them—as one can testify not only 
from the literature but from one’s own 
long experience with them—a most remark- 
able and hardly-to-be-exaggerated sense for 
reality and for the difference between 
reality and sham. No word, indeed, 
appears more commonly in the literature 
of which I am speaking than just this word 
veality. A further important circumstance 


THE PRESENT SITUATION 5 


is that, in the nature of the case, 
the conditions of army life presented quite 
unusual opportunities for what might be 
called mass-observation. There are many 
of us who feel that we knew hardly any- 
thing about the mind of the people as a 
whole until we went to France with the 
Armies, and that we have learnt as little 
more since our return. But during these 
few years overseas there was much that a 
man might read as he ran. That is, in 
the main, why we have the literature, and 
it is especially why we have one particularly 
valuable part of it—I mean the reports 
based on results obtained by the method 
of the questionnaire. 

Such a questionnaire was distributed 
among responsible observers in the 
American Army by a committee working 
under the auspices of the Young Men’s 
Christian Association, and the results have 
been published in a volume entitled 


6 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


Religion Among American Men. The con- 
clusions there arrived at are, if we speak 
broadly, very parallel to those which 
resulted from the similar inquiry carried 
out among the British Army in France, 
but it cannot be claimed that they are 
either so definite or so striking. This 
difference is no doubt due, in considerable 
part, to a difference in religious temper 
between the average manhoods of the two 
countries as mirrored in these reports, 
but I feel that it is also due in part to a 
fact which makes the whole American 
literature on this subject less pointed and 
significant than the British. In the very 
nature of the case, the War never struck 
home to America’s heart as it did to the 
heart of Britain. Her manhood never 
came to be so representatively engaged in 
it, nor were the springs of her life so deeply 
stirred by it. Moreover the opportunities 
for investigations were of much briefer 


THE PRESENT SITUATION ” 


duration, as well as being far more limited 
in scope. In what I am going to say, 
therefore, I shall be drawing more largely 
upon the British than upon the American 
reports; though I shall constantly be 
referring to the American reports too. 
I shall draw especially upon the admirable 
volume called The Army and Religion, 
which contains the results obtained from 
the questionnaire distributed by the com- 
mittee working under the joint-convener- 
ship of Principal David S. Cairns and Bishop 
Edward S$. Talbot. But I shall draw also 
upon A Soldier to the Church by Major 
W. P. Young, As Tommy Sees Us by Rev. 
A. Herbert Gray, Mr. (now Bishop) Neville 
Talbot’s Thoughts on Religion at the Front, 
The Church in the Furnace edited by Canon 
Macnutt, God and the Soldier by Drs. 
Maclean and Sclater, Papers from Picardy 
by two chaplains—Messrs. Pym and Gordon, 
and, last but not least, A Student in Arms 


wep rAd 
mee (K.. 


8 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


and The Church and the Man by Donald 
Hankey. 


I] 


Our first question will naturally be as to 
the relation of the men to the organised 
religion of the Christian Churches. The 
British report answers that “ probably 
four-fifths of the young manhood of our 
country have little or no vital connection 


9) 


with any of the Churches ”’ and speaks of 
this fact as “‘ perhaps the most salient 
factor of our evidence.’ 1 The estimate 
finds general corroboration elsewhere. “A 
large majority of the adult males,” write 
Mr. Gray, “remain outside all religiou 
organisations, and apparently indifferen 
to religion.” “ It would be idle to preten 
that the majority of our soldiers are in 


1 The Army and Religion, p. 240. 
2 As Tommy Sees Us, p. 13. 


THE PRESENT SITUATION 9 


any vital connection with the Church,” 
write Drs. Maclean and Sclater.} Th 
American report indicates a very similar 
proportion of the men as standing in any 
vital relation to organised Christianity/ 
‘Definite believers,’ it tells us, “are A 
small minority.”’ * 

This, it may be said, we had always 
realised; but what we can hardly claim 
to have realised before the War is the 
attitude adopted towards the Church, and 
the opinion held about the Church, by the 
eighty per cent of our manhood who look 
at it more or less from the outside. What 
then is that attitude and that opinion i 
mathe: / American and British reports may be 
said to be at one in finding that, if heads 
are counted, the most common attitude 
among the men was one of utter indifference. 
Sometimes it was a good-natured toleration, 


1 God and the Soldier, p. 195. 
2 Religion Among American Men, p. 13. 


10 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


but more often it was contempt. “ The 
men’s indifference is far more serious,’ 
writes one of the keenest of these observers, 
“than open hostility would have been. 
The Church is simply not a factor in their 
life.”’ 1 ‘‘On the whole,’ writes another, 
“the average male Britisher of to-day has 
not much respect for the Church. He 
does not like or admire the Church. He 
does not belong to it, and does not want 


to. ... . He regards the Churchwasge 
negligible quantity. He neither fears nor 
loves it. . . .’’2 If the evidence is trust- 


worthy, it would seem that this con- 
temptuous indifference has become much 
less vocal in active criticism in America 
than it has in Britain. Among the 
American forces, we are told, conscious 
criticism was more common among “ officers 
and college men ”’ than among the private 


1 A Soldieyv to the Church, p. 53. 
2 As Tommy Sees Us, p. 6. 


THE PRESENT SITUATION II 


soldiers. But the British observers speak 
with one voice of ‘‘a torrent of criticism 
so copious and so varied that at first it 
seems almost impossible to set it forth 
within manageable limits’’ 1—a_ torrent, 
moreover, which emanated in at least as 
great volume from the rank and file as 
from the officers’ mess. 

When we come to inquire what the 
particular counts of this criticism are, we 
find what I think may be described as an 
almost complete unanimity in the evidence. 
The British report speaks of the ‘‘ surprising 
unity of the testimony ”’ on this matter, 
and the correspondence between the British 
and the American results is no less striking. 
If we put all the evidence together, one 
main charge stands out in the very boldest 
relief, and that is that there 1s a lack of 

reality about the religion of the Christian 
Church, and a conspicuous unrelatedness to 


a 


1 The Army and Religion, pp. 193-194. 


12 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


_the real problems of human life. “ If we 
are to select any one feature of that 
criticism as central,’ says the report on 
the British questionnaire, “it is this, that 
these men as a whole believe that the 
Churches are out of touch with reality 
and out of touch with ordinary humanity. 
They think them irrelevant to the real 
business of their lives, antiquated in their 
ideas and methods, and wanting in vitality 
and conviction.” 1 Mr. Young says 
poignantly : 


“Those who had been brought up 
to go to Church’... . found anetiem 
very first days of service ‘ up the line’ 
that the whole of this comfortable 
and dignified system of faith faded 
most rapidly away. . . .. Religion 
as preached and taught was an unreal 
thing and the grim realities of war 
dissipated the unrealities for ever.” 


1 The Army and Religion, p. 194. 
2 A Soldier to the Church, Pp. 4. 


THE PRESEN Ts SITUATION 13 


d 


“It is sadly true,” says the report on the 
American questionnaire, that to many of 


the men the Church seems only 


“a convenient institution for the 
performance of conventional cere- 
monies, venerable, respectable, but 
not much concerned with the real 
business of life. Much that the Church 
emphasises men find unimportant, 
uninteresting . . . and the language 
of its sermons and_ liturgies is 
unintelligible to many.” ! 


Heuedm film in, my conviction,’ writes 

another observer, “that the first thing 

needed in all the Churches is a new baptism 

of the spirit of reality.”2  ¢ Pe aa et Bone arbors, 
There is, I think, only one charge made 

against the Church that cannot easily be 

brought under this head of unreality. It 


is what is called in the British report 
wack. of love’ and in. the American 


1 Religion Among American Men, p. 26. 
2 The Army and Religion, p. 204. 


14 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


cé 


report “‘ inadequacy in moral life.”” The 
Church, it was claimed by many, is lacking 
in the spirit of fellowship. Class- 
distinctions are allowed to intrude into its 
life. Nor. do Church-members practise 
what they preach in such a way as to be 
really impressive to the world. This line 
of criticism appears also in the literature 
as a whole, and appears in a way that 
merits close study, but it is clear that here, 
as in the more official reports, it occupies 
what is on the whole a secondary place. 
The chief count of the indictment is plainly 
lack of reality rather than lack of love. 
It is accordingly of the utmost importance 
that we should understand as clearly as 
we can what lies behind this charge of 
unreality. And I think we can sum up 
the matter ina sentence. It was just that 
the soldiers professed to find religion, as 
represented in the Christian Church, such 
a highly complicated and intricate affair 


THE PRESENT SITUATION 15 


that they were at a loss as to its real 
significance ; they found it difficult to 
know where its centre of gravity was to be 
looked for, and where exactly it touched 
real life. The British report gives first 
place to the fact that “the doctrinal 
message is unintelligible. They do not 
know what it is all about.’’1 There are 
few more frequent words in the literature 
as a whole than the word mystijfication. 
“Many men,” says Mr. Gray, “ find them- 
selves almost hopelessly mystified as they 
try to approach religion.” 2 ‘‘ Among 
hindrances,’’ runs another report, “‘ I should 
class first perplexity. The concepts and 
facts dealt with in Christianity are so 
vast, that theological systems bewilder 
them.” * ‘“‘ The Church,’ we are told, 
“has no intellectual hold on the men’”’; 
“there is now no intellectual compulsion 
1 The Army and Religion, p. 195. 


2 As Tommy Sees Us, Pp. 57. 
® The Army and Religion, p. 201. 


16 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


to believe the Christian tale.’’1 In days 
gone by, before education had spread to 
the people as a whole, the man in the 
street had done little thinking of his own 
in religious matters. He had accepted 
traditional authority without question. 
But now education has done its work; 
and it is abundantly clear that a great 
proportion of the men who made up the 
Armies in France were doing their own 
thinking to such an extent at least that 
blind acceptance of authority, or of 
tradition, was no longer possible to them. 
They could not swallow the Church’s 
teaching in the lump; and in the attempt 
to think it out afresh for themselves, they 
did not know where to begin. Besides, 
there was more than puzzlement in their 
minds; there was very often active 
disagreement too. If there was much in 
the creeds that they could not understand, 


1 The Army and Religion, pp. 187, 197. . 


THE PRESENT SITUATION 17 


there were some things that they under- 
stood and rejected. On this point the 
evidence is abundant, and what is particu- 
larly stressed in it is the impression that 
the Church is clinging, in despite of the 
assured results of modern knowledge, to 
the ideas and view-points of a far distant 
Bee) = Antiquated ~~ is another’ very 
common word all through this literature ; 
and it reveals the existence of a wide-spread 
suspicion that the knowledge and guidance 
which the Church has to offer may be 
largely out of date. Says the British report : 


“To sum up a good deal of the 
evidence, we seem to have left the 
impression upon them that there is 
little or no life in the Church at all, 
that it is an antiquated and decaying 
institution, standing by dogmas 
expressed in archaic language, and 
utterly out of touch with modern 
thought and living experience.”’ 4 


1 The Army and Religion, p. 220. 


18 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


Another very marked source both of 
bewilderment and of resentment, which 
is made much of by all the observers, is 
the confusing variety of Christian teaching 
in the different denominations. The sum- 
total of the evidence goes to show, in the 
first place, that the manhood of Great 
Britain and America, taken as a whole, 
has practically no interest in, or under- 
standing of, the points of doctrine and 
usage which divide Presbyterian, Episco- 
palian, Baptist, Methodist and Lutheran. 
This, for example, is the report that comes 
from sect-burdened America : 


“ Although a great majority of the 
men expressed some church preference 
when urged to, it is quite clear that 
the preference was not very emphatic. 
Even among men who were on the 
fringe of active membership or attended 
the services available in the Army 
the feeling of denominational distinc- 
tions appears to have been very slight. 


THE PRESENT SITUATION 19 


More significant than the 
Bread of the ‘ unchurched majority ’ 
is the way in which the members of 
the various Protestant bodies ignored 
denominational lines under army con- 
ditions. In the main they showed 
little interest in the affiliation of the 
chaplain and rarely expressed any 
desire for distinctively denominational 
ministrations or services.” } 


PvoaeAmerical Teport, it) is. true;’ ‘may 
perhaps be read as implying that the 
common attitude to denominationalism is 
rather one of utter indifference than of 
active resentment, but all the British 
evidence goes to show that things have 
gone further than that among the British 
people. There was a time when the 
Churches stood opposed to one another on 
issues of creed and worship which were of 
vital interest and importance to the common 
man and roused his keenest enthusiasms ; 


1 Religion Among American Men, pp. 29-30. 


20 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


but nowadays these issues have no more 
than an antiquarian interest to him, and 
the common man is no antiquary. Yet 
the Churches still stand apart, kept from 
reunion and from united testimony by a 
narrow inner circle in each of them—a 
circle which is often largely composed of 
the professional ministry and their house- 
holds. And the common man feels, often 
very keenly, that this state of affairs adds 
immeasurably to the air of unreality, the 
sense of bewilderment, and the musty 
intellectual atmosphere with which religion 
has come to be associated in his mind. 
I shall quote in full the two paragraphs in 
which Principal Cairns and Bishop Talbot 
summarise the British evidence. 


“The charge brought against the 
Churches of want of sympathy and unity 
with one another. A review of the 
whole evidence in this section brings 
this massively out as one of the 


THE. PRESENT SITUATION 21 


leading reasons for the alleged failure 
of the Church to hold the men. The 
mischiefs wrought by the present 
divisions of the Churches and the 
scandal caused by their want of charity 
to one another are again and again 
emphasised. 

Prominent among those evil results 
is the confusion which, as we have 
seen, is wide-spread throughout the 
Army as to what Christianity really 
is. It is certainly one of the causes 
of the ‘fog’ in the minds of the men 
as to the essential nature of the 
Christian religion. That confusion is 
the inevitable reflex of a _ divided 
testimony.” 1 


And I cannot resist giving you, in addition, 
two statements by individual observers 
which are quoted in support of this 
conclusion. An officer with a Scottish 
regiment writes to say: 


“The multiplicity of contending 
creeds and competing Churches, of 
1 The Army and Religion, p. 212. 


22 


THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


rival sects, bodies and factions, all 
professing to represent the true 
Christian faith, bewilder the men, 
and dispose them to give up religion 
altogether as not to be taken seriously 
and too hopeless for a plain man to 
make anything of; while the more 
intelligent of them are baffled by the 
intellectual complexity in which at 
the best the books, doctrines, and 
institutions of Christianity have 
become involved in modern times.” } 


And an Assistant Chaplain-General writes : 


“In the mind of the men” Christianity 


ee 


“a mosaic of kill-joyism and Balaam’s 
ass’s ears and Noah, and mothers’ meetings, 
and Athanasian damns, and the Archbishop 
of Canterbury at {£15,000 a year,’ and 
urges upon us that what is mainly needful 
is to help men to get through and behind 


all this to the treasure that lies hidden at 
the heart of our religion.? 


1 The Army and Religion, pp. 217-218. 
2 The Army and Religion, pp. 61-62. 


THE PRESENT SITUATION 23 
IIT 


Keeping in our minds the impression 
that we have thus gained of the attitude 
taken by the men of the armies to the 
organised religion of the Christian Church, 
let us now see whether they had any 
positive standards of conduct and 
philosophy of life of their own, and any 
positive faith to guide them through the 
terrible ordeal that faced them. Here 
again one cannot but be struck by the 
remarkable unanimity of the evidence, and 
I cannot better begin my summary than 
with the opening words of this section of 
the British report : 


“It is impossible not to feel the 
sharpness of the contrast when we 
turn from the comparative poverty 
of the religious thoughts and ideals 
of the men to the wealth of noble 
virtues which they reveal in their 
relationship to one another and to 


24 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


the splendour of heroism which in 
great multitudes they have shown in 
loyalty to duty and to Fatherland. 
This contrast is indeed one of the most 
impressive features of the whole 
evidence, and ought to be deeply and 
thoroughly considered by all who wish 
to understand the situation.” 1 


If we ask what particular virtues were best 
loved and most nobly displayed by the 
men, we have this impressive list given 
us: comradeship, unselfishness, cheerful- 
ness, sense of duty, courage, sincerity, 
humility. The list given in the American 
report is remarkably similar and, I think, 
even more impressive: courage, unselfish- 
ness, generosity, persistent cheerfulness, 
straightforwardness, humility, loyalty, 
devotion. Similar lists are to be found 
in all the books, and what strikes us at 
once, as it so forcibly struck the observers 
themselves, is the amazing Christianity of 
1 The Army and Religion, p. 125 


THE PRESENT SITUATION 25 


them. They read like Pauline lists of the 
fruits of the Spirit! Whereas, actually 
they are attempts to describe the standards 
operative in the minds, and to a not 
wholly discouraging extent effective in 
the deeds, of a body of men of whom only 
some twenty per cent stood in any living 
relation to the Christian Church at all! 
“ The Average Man,” says Donald Hankey, 
“admires courage, generosity, practical 
kindness, single-minded honesty, persistence 
in trying to do the right thing’’; and he 
goes so far as to add that “there is not a 
single feature of the Average Man’s ideal 
which is not part and parcel of the ideal 
which Jesus Christ taught and embodied.” 4 

That, you will say, informs us about the 
moral code of the men; but what now 
about their creed, their philosophy of life ? 
The first part of the answer to that question 
isto be, found in the fact that - their 


1 The Church and the Man, pp. 15, 20 


26 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


admiration of the ideals of loyalty, 
generosity, courage and self-sacrifice, and 
especially their sense of the duty of cheer- 
fulness and what Donald Hankey (in the 


€ 


passage last quoted) called their “ persis- 
tence in trying to do the right thing,” 
were felt—in a dim way by the men 
themselves, and very vividly by the lookers- 
on—to be something more than a mere 
code of action and, in fact, to contain in 
themselves a kind of working faith. Mr. 
Young writes : 

‘If we could be said to have any © 
philosophy of life at all—and that 
would have been the last thing we 
would have thought of calling it—it 
would all have been comprehended 
in ‘the one’ ‘brief mle (oreyiaere 
the right thing.’ It was with us from 
the very start, and our life in the army 
was both based and built on it.” } 

To this faith Donald Hankey gave the 


1 A Soldier to the Church, p. 19. 


THE PRESENT SITUATION 27 


name of “ the religion of the inarticulate,” 
eloquently urging upon us his conviction 
that in it there was the true essence of 
faith. And nobody has testified to the 
power of this faith with a more beautiful 
insight than has Neville Talbot (son of 
Bishop Talbot and now himself Bishop of 
Pretoria) in his memorable little book. 
Deep in the men’s hearts, he says, 


“is a great trust and faith in God. 
It is an inarticulate faith expressed 
in deeds. The top levels, as it were, 
of their consciousness are much filled 
with grumbling and foul language and 
physical occupations; but beneath 
le deep spiritual springs, whence 
issue their cheerfulness, stubbornness, 
patience, generosity, humility, and 
willingness to die. They declare by 
what they are and do that there 
1s a worth-whileness in effort and 
SLCHETICCy 2 


1 Thoughts on Religion at the Front, pp. 8-9. Italics not in 
the original. 


28 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


What the men are dumbly aware of, he 
says again, 
“is that there is something going on 
in the world which demands primary 
allegiance, and the putting second of 
every self-interest. At the Front 
men hardly know what it is. 
They only know—a wonderful majority 
of them—that something great and 
vighteous wants them and requires of 
them their help.” + 


The religion of the Armies, in fact, was 
a religion of deeds and of loyalties rather 
than of clearly formulated beliefs. This 
is made much of in all the books. “ First 
of all,’’ says the American report, “ they 
tended to think that religion is primarily 
a matter of deeds rather than of belief, 
that belief does not matter much. The 
feeling is quite prevalent that conduct is 
all.’ 2 This, however, is not to be under- 

1 Thoughts on Religion at the Front, p. 55. Italics not in 


the original. 
2 Religion Among American Men, p. 33. 


THE PRESENT SITUATION 29 


stood to mean that anything like dogmatic 
agnosticism, not to say atheism, was a 
common attitude among the men. The 
evidence is quite unanimous in declaring 
that “‘ not five men in a thousand have any 
real doubt of God’s existence.’ 4 It may 
be said, and many of the reports do say, 
that the bare reality of God was about all 
they did believe in, with the exception of 
“a vague belief in immortality.” The 
writers of the report on the British inquiry, 
and also Bishop Neville Talbot, make use 
of the old Stoic and eighteenth-century 
distinction between natural and positive 
religion in this connection. The mass of 
our manhood, they tell us, have natural 
religion, but not the positive or revealed 
religion of the Christian or any other 
Church. I believe myself that this is a 
distinction which has long been transcended 
in our modern thinking, and that to re- 


As Tommy Sees Us, p. 19. 


30 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


introduce it here does nothing but obscure 
our perception of the real facts. It seems 
clear to me that Jesus did not present His 
Gospel to the men of His time as something 
different from, and to be added to, their 
own heart’s faith, but rather as its crowning 
expression. To many of the keenest and 
most understanding observers the renun- 
ciation by these Armies of an articulated 
creed seemed to be, in good part, the fruit 
neither of heedlessness nor of mental inertia, 
but of something much more like a simple, 
unquestioning trustfulness. Mr. Young is 
not afraid to sum up the spirit of it in the © 
words of Newman's hymn: 


“ Keep Thou my feet; I do not 
ask to see 
The distant scene; one step 
enough for me.” 


“We realise at the Front,” he says, “ that 
the issues of life and death aren’t in our 
hands. . . . But just because we do the 


THE PRESENT SITUATION 3I 


only right thing and realise that everything 
else is out of our power, there comes to us 
a peace of mind and content. We take 
the one step and trust the rest. . . . Itis 
the beginning of the peace of God.’ ! 
“The peace of God,” writes the ‘ Student 
in Arms’ with an identity of sentiment at 
which once again we can only wonder, “‘ the 
peace of God which passeth all under- 
standing simply comes from not worrying 
about results, because they are God’s 
business and not ours.”’ 2 

This faith, then, the men of our Armies 
had and by it they lived. But—and here 
lies the final tragedy of the evidence—it 
did not occur to them to think that this 
might be what that puzzling thing, religion. 
—or Christianity—was after all about. It 
is from the same two writers that I shall 
quote passages in support of this conclusion, 


1 A Soldier to the Church, p. 133. 
2A Student in Arms, Second Series (Pocket Edition), 
p. 1506. 


32 


and 


THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


these two passages must be my last 


quotations from this whole poignant and 


appealing literature. The first is from 


Mr. Young. 


The 


‘“ Nothing ever made me realise how 
little the preaching and teaching of 
Christianity had sunk into men’s minds 
and been understood, until I saw men 
living in the Christ-spirit and not 
recognising 1t as such.” ! 


second is from Donald Hankey. 


“The soldier, and in this case the 
soldier means the working-man, does 
not in the least connect the things 
that he really believes in with 
Christianity. . . . dhe men ‘really 
had deep-seated beliefs in goodness, 
and the only reason why they did not 
pray and go to communion was that 
they never connected the goodness 
in which they believed with the God 
in Whom the chaplains said they 
ought to believe.” ? 


1 A Soldier to the Church, p. 31. 
2 A Student in Arms, pp. 108-109. 


THE PRESENT SITUATION 33 


IV 

I hope that in trying to compress within 
the compass of a single chapter the 
substance of so much living experience 
and penetrating observation and _ fine- 
tempered writing, I have not entirely 
robbed them of their impressiveness and 
power, or of the authority which the 
reader cannot but feel to attach to so 
considerable a volume of unanimous 
testimony. Shall I now be still bolder 
and attempt to put the main drift of it 
into one or two sentences? What we 
have here, then, is the plain discovery 
that some eighty per cent of the prime 
manhood of Great Britain and America 
stand in little or no living relation to 
organised Christianity, and that behind 
their indifference to it there is a strong and 
rising tide of feeling that religion, as it is 
presented to them in the Christian Church, 
is out of touch with reality and with the 

D 


34 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


real business of life. It is, they feel, a 
hopelessly intricate maze of doctrine in 
which they cannot: find their way, and to 
which they do not readily turn for help in 
time of need. Some of it seems to them to 
be definitely out of date, belonging to an 
age long dead. The points in dispute 
between rival sectaries of the Church 
mean nothing to them, but on the contrary 
go far to increase their vague but growing 
suspicion that the whole affair has little 
or nothing to do with them. Yet those 
who feel thus are no reprobates, but— 
and I am indulging after all in one more 
quotation (from Mr. Gray)—*“‘ men whose 
splendid qualities often bring tears to the 
eyes, men capable of endurance, kindness, 
and deliberate self-sacrifice in a great 
cause ’’ }—men, in a word, whose loyalties, 
at least, are wonderfully like the loyalties 
of Christ. Nor are they altogether without 


1 As Tommy Sees Us, p. 9 


THE PRESENT SITUATION 35 


faith; faith at least in duty and in 
the rightness of doing the right thing; 
faith that “‘something great and righteous 
wants them and requires of them their 
help) In such; a ‘faith they find true 
support. But they do not know how 
essentially Christian are such faith and 
loyalty, nor do they think of these things 
as having much connection with what is 
commonly known as religion. Such, in 
broadest outline, is the situation we have 
here before us. 

I may perhaps be allowed to add that, 
as concerns myself, every main point in 
this testimony finds ample support in my 
Own) ‘experience. Some ‘of the points, 
indeed, my personal experience would have 
led me to state in even stronger terms than 
those in which they have been stated 
here; but I have thought it wiser to rely 
upon the published literature. Yet I 
cannot refrain from recording the fact 


36 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


that the most saddening of all the 
realisations which one observer took home 
with him from the zone of the Armies was 
just this realisation that there were 
thousands upon thousands of soldiers eager 
—often quite pathetically eager—for the 
least ray of light upon the great puzzle of 
life, who were nevertheless instinctively 
sceptical of the ability of the Church’s 
chaplains to offer them any such thing. 


V 


These, then, are the facts. And they 
are the facts, as I need hardly again 
remind you, not merely of this or that 
army’s religion in time of war, but of the 
essential religious situation with which 
Western culture is to-day faced. Indeed, 
I might, if I cared, have illustrated that 
situation in quite other ways, as, for 
instance, from a study of the standpoints 


THE PRESENT SITUATION 37 


reflected in the general literature of our 
age, or from the problems now present to 
the minds of Christian missionaries in 
many foreign lands. I have simply chosen 
the approach to the subject that lay 
nearest to my own hand. 

And now what are we to do about this 
state of affairs ? 

There are some among us who think 
that what we need is a new religion. 
Christianity, they say, has been long out- 
moded, as indeed have all the religious 
systems of antiquity, and what we need in 
their places is something which, being 
grounded four-square upon the discoveries 
of modern science, will be very radically 
different from all that has been called 
religion in the past. A few, indeed, would 
go further and would claim that in the 
future we must do without religion 
altogether, making jettison of God Himself 
and of all the helps and hopes which are 


38 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


associated with His name, and living only 
by the dry and scanty light of a thoroughly 
up-to-date scientific outlook. My own 
judgment of the situation is of a profoundly 
different kind. It seems to me that human 
nature is fundamentally the same in every 
age and that its deepest needs will always 
find satisfaction in the same things. Those 
who think that their souls are cast in 
another mould than were the souls of the 
ancient Hebrews or Greeks or of those 
Romans who yielded up their Empire to 
the power of the Christian message, think 
so only because they know little of history 
and less of their own hearts. Faith in 
God is as much a necessity of life to the 
modern man as it was to the rudest of his 
ancestors, and, fundamentally, it is the 
same faith in Him that must satisfy them 
both. We do right to be proud of the 
spectacular advances which science has 
made within our own time, but we do 


THE PRESENT SITUATION 39 


wrong to cheat ourselves with the belief 
that these advances have been of such a 
nature as to provide us with any other 
foundation for the life of our spirits than 
was available to the men of olden time. 
The best scientists are those who take 
their most assured results with the greatest 
degree of caution and reserve, and who 
know better than to mistake working 
guesses for final certainties. Yet not on 
working guesses, nor on cautious, provisional 
syntheses, nor on opinions so “ up-to-the- 
minute’ as to be out of date the next 
minute, can the spirit of man ever build for 
itself a safe habitation ; but only on certain 
deep and elemental convictions of its own, 
which, because they were firmly established 
before science was born, can hardly be 
affected by the ever-changing surprises 
of its meteoric career. 

What our generation needs, in truth, is 
not to have the old religion replaced but 


40 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


to have it re-interpreted. Religion, as 
we know it in the world, is a thing of 
infinite variety, of endless ramification, of 
exceeding intricacy. Even Christianity 
may seem to be the name, not of a simple 
view of life, but of a vast and complex 
historical development; and there are 
many who have lost their way in its maze 
of doctrines and of sects. That is the 
real root of our trouble and I believe 
there is only one way of meeting it—we 
must find our way back to the fountain- 
head. We must make re-discovery, and 
help others to make re-discovery, of the 
true centre of gravity in this accumulated 
mass of tradition. We must dig down 
afresh to its deep foundations in human 
experience. In the literature, from which 
I have been quoting, much is made of the 
need of semplification in religion. ‘“‘ The 
Call for Simplicity’’ is the title of one of 
the chapters in Mr. Gray’s book, and there 


THE PRESENT SITUATION 41 


is in it a strong sense of the unwieldiness 
which contact with the grim realities of 
those days so often revealed to exist in 
our traditional theologies. It is true that 
if we make too much of a word like 
simplicity, there will be some who will be 
afraid lest this should mean that, by too 
severe a process of pruning, something of 
the rich harvest of past experience should 
be lost to us. From some points of view 
I understand this fear and sympathise 
with it; yet I am quite sure on the other 
hand that, when Christianity first came 
into the world, one of its outstanding 
assets was a kind of simplicity which it 
nowadays too often lacks. It is quite plain 
to me, as I shall have occasion to repeat in a 
later chapter, that one of the things which 
Jesus did to the religion of His forefathers 
was just to simplify it, to disburden it of 
a great deal of unnecessary weight which 
it had long been carrying. His Gospel 


42 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


was a Gospel for plain men. The other 
religious teachers of His day loaded the 
plain man with burdens grievous to be 
borne, but Jesus’ yoke was easy and His 
burden was_light ; and the common people 
heard Him gladly. All this is true; and 
yet I should at the same time agree that 
the kind of simplification which is here 
chiefly in question is rather a clarification 
or disentanglement of the tradition than 
a mere lopping or pruning of any of its 
richness. There are better ways of 
simplifying than by whittling down. The 
most elaborate thing may be made simple 
and intelligible, without any sacrifice of 
its fulness of detail, if only we can discern 
the pattern of it, or can catch the spirit 
of ) it; or, can), discover its?) beamaam 
heart. | 
Can we then discover the beating heart 
of religion? Well, I dare not promise 
you too much, but we can at least make 


THE PRESENT SITUATION 43 


the attempt. In this short book I wish 
to raise in your minds the question as to 
what religion really and essentially is and 
where in the human soul lies the ever- 
bubbling fountain from which it springs. 
I wish also to raise the question as to what 
Christianity essentially is and what its 
particular message must be understood 
to be. I believe that if we can answer 
these questions at all truly, we shall find 
that religion, far from being out of touch 
with reality, is made of the very stuff of 
our most real life and has direct and vital 
bearing upon our most practical problems ; 
and that in Christianity it does but receive 
a fresh and bountiful baptism in the waters 
of living experience. And perhaps we 
shall find also that such men as those who, 
for our sakes, went gladly into battle with 
a simple-hearted faith in the rightness of 
doing the right thing, had more of the 
root of true religion in them than they 


44 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


themselves knew, and were not as far as 
some traditional formule would make them 
seem from the Kingdom of Christ. 


CHAP TE RMIT 


WHAT RELIGION IS-—-SOME MISUNDER- 
STANDINGS 


I 


Wuat is religion? What are its roots in 
the human soul? And whence does it 
derive the light by which it lives ? 

_ These are the questions that we must 
now raise in our minds. To some of you 
they may seem, at first sight, to be questions 
that are very easy to answer. Religion is 
so familiar a part of your lives that you 
may feel there should be no special difficulty 
in saying what the real essence of it is. 
Yet, if time allowed, I should like to try 
with you a simple experiment of a kind 
that is now very familiar to psychologists. 


I should like to pronounce the one word 
45 


46 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


‘“religion’’ before each of you in turn, 
and ask you all to tell me what the first 
idea or image is which it suggests to your 
minds. I am sure (for the experiment is 
one which has been tried before) that the 
associative responses called forth in your 
minds by that apparently simple word 
would be quite surprisingly various. One 
of you might answer “a totem-pole,”’ 
another ‘“‘a red-robed cardinal,’ another 
“the great facade of a Gothic cathedral,” 
another “‘the sprinkling of water on a baby’s 
head,’ another “the experience of con- 
version,’ another the ‘‘ Shorter Catechism,” 
and still another “the Doctrine of the 
Trinity.”” To some of your minds there 
would be suggested some ritual act, to 
others some ecclesiastical organisation, to 
others some social gathering, to others 
some philosophical problem, and to still 
others some deep stirring of the emotions. 
Dean Inge has recently, and I think very 


SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS 47 


aptly, compared religion to those chemical 
elements which are never found in a pure 
state, but only in combination with other 
elements from which it is very difficult 
to segregate them. The comparison very 
well illustrates the difficulty of our present 
problem, which is just that of segregating 
the true and abiding and indispensable 
essence of religion from the ever-changing 
multitude of forms which it assumes in 
its necessary alliances with the other 
elements of our life. The problem is one 
which has long agitated the history of 
human thought, but there has perhaps 
never been an age when a clear answer 
to it was so much of an imperative, 
practical necessity as it is to-day. There 
seems, aS we saw in the last chapter, 
no other way to dissolve the air of unreality 
and practical irrelevancy and musty effete- 
ness with which religion is surrounded in 
the minds of so many of our contemporaries, 


48 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


than by exhibiting its true inward nature 
in the clearest light we can. In this 
chapter I shall deal with some views as 
to the nature of religion which, though 
they have often been put forward, and are 
therefore likely to contain some partial 
truth, yet seem'to me to be in thejend 
seriously misleading. In the next I shall 
try to put before you what I believe to be 
a truer view. 


II 


Let us begin, as the history of systematic 
thought itself began, with the view which 
finds the essence of religion to consist in 
philosophical speculation. This is what has 
come to be known as the rationalistic 
theory of religion. Rationalism might be 
defined as the tendency to look upon 
science as the only source of reliable 
knowledge which is open to us; and the 


SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS 49 


rationalist’s attitude to religion is simply 
to assume that if it is to have any light at 
all, it must get its light from science—some 
would say from physics, biology and 
psychology, others from that more 
speculative extension of scientific method 
which is called philosophy or metaphysics. 
According to this view, religion first made 
its appearance in the world as a very 
primitive explanatory theory of the nature 
of things, and was thus the lineal precursor 
of exact science and academic philosophy ; 
and it still lives on in the world as a kind 
of popular metaphysic. But the educated 
man will naturally be anxious to avail 
himself of the fuller and clearer knowledge 
which science proper has now put at his 
disposal, and will consequently submit his 
traditional religious beliefs to be tested in 
the light of the latest scientific and 
metaphysical results. He will find, the 


rationalists tell us, that much of what he 
E 


50 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


has been taught in the name of religion 
is scientifically untenable, or at least 
unverifiable ; but other doctrines he will 
find to be in accord with the teachings 
of science, and these he will continue to 
believe, having now at last found for them 
a solid scientific foundation. It is clear 
that on this view there is no real difference 
between religious belief on the one hand 
and science and metaphysics on the other. 
In the former, no doubt, our knowledge is 
given a more practical turn and appli- 
cation than in the latter, but it is not (we 
shall be told) derived from any different 
source; for there is no other source. 
There is no avenue to reliable knowledge 
but the avenue of scientific method; and 
what that avenue is, any text-book of 
logic (which is the theory of scientific 
method) will tell you—it consists in the 
systematic observation of facts and in 
using the Law of Cause and Effect to 


SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS 51 


draw inferences from the facts thus 
observed. Here is how Mr. Lowes 
_ Dickinson, who is a fair example of a 
modern rationalist, puts it: 


“Only perception, and inference, 
and logic, only, in the broadest sense, 
science—under which, for the moment, 
I will ask to be allowed to include 
philosophy—can teach us anything 
about the Universe and our place in 
it; can teach us whether or no 
there be anything corresponding with 
what we have called God; whether 
or no the individual soul survives 
death ; whether or no the process of 
things moves towards a good end.” 

“Religious truth is attainable, if 
at all, only by the method of science.” 4 


This way of regarding religion has obtained 
such wide currency in our Western World 
that it is worth while looking a little closely 
into its history. If we wish to find the 


1 Religion: A Criticism and a Forecast (New York, 
1905), PP. 52-53, P- Vill. 


52 THE -ROOTS OF RELIGION 


real origins of it, we must go back to the 
very earliest beginnings of Western science. 
When science and philosophy were born 
among the Greek thinkers of the sixth 
century before Christ, they found religion, 
of course, not only already in existence, 
but with the marks of having been in 
existence from time immemorial. What 
explanation, then, were they to give of 
religion? How was it related to them- 


6 


selves, and how were its “ gods’”’ related 
to the objects of their own research ? The 
Greek teachers answered, with almost one 
voice, that religion and science cannot 
ultimately be distinguished, and that there- 
fore only as much of the traditional religion 
can be retained as science is able to verify 
by its own newly-discovered methods. 
Religion, they said, has lived in the past 
by “ faith ” or “ opinion,” but now it must 
live by the light of expert speculative 
inquiry. The earliest of these teachers all 


SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS 53 


seem to have believed that what religion 
meant by “ gods’ was simply the ultimate 
quasi-chemical elements of which they were 
now discovering the whole world to be com- 
posed. And even the greatest of them, Plato 
and Aristotle, were convinced that the true 
way of assuring oneself of the existence and 
goodness of God was by means of arguments 
drawn from the philosophical theory of 
knowledge on the one hand and mathe- 
matical astronomy on the other; and Plato 
at least was convinced that equally strict 
scientific arguments were available in 
support of the belief in a future life; 
but the rest of traditional belief, they 
said, must be regarded as mere “‘myth.”’} 
This Greek view of things was, as you 
know, adopted by the Christian scholars 
of the Middle Ages with one very important 
and far-reaching addition. These scholars 
willingly embraced the notion that religion 


1 Aristotle, Metaphysica, 1074b, 


54 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


is not to be distinguished from philosophical 
knowledge, both having as their common 
aim the attainment of the whole truth 
about the Universe. They believed with 
Aristotle that religion may legitimately 
rely upon science and philosophy for the 
confirmation of certain articles of its creed, 
and they were in essential agreement with 
him as to what the articles were which 
could be thus confirmed. Where they 
differed was in their firm belief in the 
availability of another and utterly different 
source of knowledge which was every whit 
as reliable as science and philosophy, and 
which, besides offering additional confir- 
mation of those articles of creed which 
science and philosophy were able to reach 
in their own way, introduced us to a great 
many other articles which science and 
philosophy could not reach at all. This 
other source was revelation, and by 
revelation the medievals meant the 


SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS 


communication of information from God 
to man by a means so direct that it could 
be open to no doubt or question, but must 
be accepted im foto without regard to its 
inherent reasonableness. On this view, 
two wholly different sources of knowledge 
about the structure of the Universe are 
open to us—reason and_ revelation ; 
scientific and philosophical inquiry on the 
one hand, and the sacred tradition on the 
other. The simpler articles of our creed 
(such as the existence and unity of God, 
the Ptolemaic cosmology, and the immor- 
tality of the soul) we can get from either 
source; the more advanced articles (like 
the Trinity of God, the doctrine of creation 
and the doctrine of the last things) we can 
get from the sacred tradition alone. This 
position is what is known as the medizval 
synthesis, and it is the most widely in- 
fluential synthesis of the respective claims 
of religion and science that the world has 


56 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


ever known. We might _ characterise 
it as the perfectly harmonious marriage of 
an exceedingly high-and-dry rationalism 
with a no less naive traditionalism. 

Into the particular scientific proofs of 
God’s existence which were current among 
the medieval teachers I need not here 
enter. You are all familiar with them. 
In essence they were the same as those of 
Plato and Aristotle and as those still 
current in certain quarters to this day. 
We need only note that, in the words of a 
distinguished authority on this period, 
“all genuine arguments for God’s existence 
take their start, according to St. Thomas 
(Aquinas), from sensible facts of which 
God is inferred to be the cause’’ ; 1 which 
is to say that they follow the ordinary 
method of inductive science. 

The medieval synthesis was no doubt 


1C. C. J. Webb, Studies in the History of Natural 
Theology, p 238. 


SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS 57 


very water-tight while it lasted and, as 
you know, it is still the orthodox position 
of the Roman Church. But as early as 
the sixteenth century it began to spring a 
serious leak. About that time inquiring 
minds began to have difficulty about the 
implicit and unreasoning acceptance of the 
sacred tradition, and from then onwards 
there arose in Northern Europe a strong 
and growing body of suspicion as to the 
authenticity of this “ special”’ revelation 
which the medievals believed to be 
embodied in the words of the Bible, the 
decisions of the Councils, the opinion of the 
Early Fathers, and the definitions of the 
Roman Pontiff. What was the result ? 
The result, among a large and ever-growing 
company of thinkers, was simply to set 
aside altogether this second element in the 
medieval synthesis—revelation—, and to 
leave the first—scientific and philosophical 
investigation—standing alone once more, 


58 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


III 

Such, then, in very brief outline, is the 
lineage of that modern rationalism which 
regards religion as being essentially a 
matter of metaphysical speculation and 
counsels it accordingly to place its sole 
reliance upon the results of scientific and 
metaphysical research. It is a view which 
is still widely current among us, and there- 
fore it is the more necessary that, before 
passing judgment against it, we should 
make full acknowledgment of the measure 
of truth which it contains. I think we 
shall all be prepared to recognise the 
justice of the observation from which 
rationalism starts—namely, that religion 
and metaphysics both alike claim, in some 
sort, to give us knowledge about the 
ultimate nature and meaning of the 
Universe. This being true, it seems likely 
that the two bear some direct relation to one 
another ; and so we can readily understand 


SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS 59 


how metaphysicians should be led into 
believing that this relation is one of 
simple dependence on the part of religion, 
and that in all matters of religious belief 
it is the metaphysician, as metaphysician, 
who must be given the last word. And 
yet, current as this view still is in certain 
quarters, I believe that no movement of 
thought has been more characteristic of 
the last century generally, and of our own 
generation in particular, than a steadily- 
growing sense of the difficulty and absurdity 
of any such position. Rationalism as a 
whole has been subjected to a severer and 
more prolonged fire of criticism during the 
’ last century than ever before in its long 
history, and the rationalistic interpretation 
of religion has, I think, come in for even 
more than its proportionate share of 
attention. What, then, is the case against 
it? I shall try to sum it up as briefly as I 
can. 


60 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


I think what the ordinary man—and. 
that means everybody but a few specialists 
—feels when he is told that religion is a 
matter of philosophical speculation is that, 
if this be really true, then religion is not 
for ‘him. The» majority of us (feelgene 
obligation to concern ourselves. either 
with the quickly-shifting panorama of 
current scientific theories or with the 
numerous and conflicting philosophical 
theories that are at any one moment 
in the field’) The interests “oft 
of us may lie that way, and it is well 
and good that they should; but the 
interests of the majority of mankind must 
always lie in other and more practical 
directions. Tell the man in the street that 
religion is the same thing as metaphysics, 
and he will feel that he can, with a perfectly 
clear conscience, leave it altogether on one 
side. 

This difficulty the rationalists have some- 


SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS 61 


times tried to meet by pointing out that 
there is no need for the ordinary man to 
be an expert in philosophy, any more than 
there is need for him to be an expert in 
medicine. As he accepts his medicine 
from the trained physician, so may he not 
accept his religious beliefs from the trained 
philosopher ? 

This suggestion may at first sight seem 
reasonable enough, and yet, if we examine 
it closely, we shall find it to be nothing less 
than preposterous. We shall all feel, I 
think, that there are at least two difficulties, 
each of them separately insuperable, which 
stand in the way of our acceptance of it. 
The first is the difficulty of knowing which 
philosopher to believe. It is an undeniable 
fact that there is no branch of learned 
inquiry where a consensus of experts is so 
completely lacking as it is in metaphysics. 
I will go as far as to say that to ask the man 
in the street to allow his life to be guided 


62 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


by the received conclusions of academic 
metaphysics is to use words altogether 
without meaning; because there are no 
such received conclusions. Think only— 
to pursue the matter no further—of the 
apparently perennial opposition of 
naturalism and idealism, and you will see 
the quandary in which the non-expert must 
at once be placed. I do not mean to imply 
that there is anything discreditable to the 
philosophers in this state of matters. I 
do) not think’ there 1s. It’ seems) toMiae 
quite natural that learned men should be 
unanimous about small matters of detail, 
like the effect of certain drugs, or the 
classification of animal species, or the laws 
of thermo-dynamics, while there should be 
no such unanimity about the larger issues 
of the nature of the Universe as a whole. 
Indeed some of the very greatest thinkers 
have taken the view that scientific and 
metaphysical research, as such, can never 


SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS 63 


hope to answer our ultimate questions 
about the nature of things as a whole; 
and [ am not sure that they are not right. 
But at all events it is clear that as the 
scientists approach these ultimate questions 
the sureness of their step, as well as their 
ability to keep in step with one another, 
seems proportionately to decrease. And 
there is another feeling which, as I think, 
we are likely to have in this whole matter. 
We cannot help suspecting that what 
divides the experts, as they face these 
highest slopes of the mountain of knowledge, 
and especially what divides the meta- 
physicians into the two great traditional 
camps of idealism and naturalism, is not 
any difference in scientific or philosophic 
perception as such, but rather the presence 
or absence of a simple religious faith in 
their hearts from the beginning. If there 
is any truth in this suspicion, then it is clearly 
absurd to try to base our religious faith 


64 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


upon the conclusions of philosophers, seeing 
that these conclusions may turn out to be 
themselves based upon nothing else than 
religious faith. 

Indeed I should say that it is just here 
that we strike the small measure of truth, 
as well as the much larger measure of 
untruth, which there is in the idea that 
religion consists in philosophical speculation. 
If we take philosophy in its widest sense, 
not as a mere continuation of scientific 
method into a more speculative realm, but 
as an attempt to embrace all our knowledge, 
from whatever quarter received, in a single 
synoptic view, then indeed it cannot and 
should not be dissociated from religious 
faith. Only the truth would then be, not 
that faith draws upon philosophy for its 
support, but, on the contrary, that 
philosophy draws in no small part upon 
religious faith. 

But there is a second, and an even more 





SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS 65 


insurmountable, objection to the proposal 
that the man in the street should take his 
religious creed at second-hand from the 
philosophers, and that is simply that 
religion is far too vital and important a 
thing to be taken at second-hand from 
anybody. There is a great deal of 
knowledge that we must all of us be content 
merely to accept from those who know and 
have seen; but surely in religion, if no- 
where else, we feel that we must know and 
see for ourselves. Second-hand geography 
may be perfectly good geography. Second- 
hand faith is just not faith at all. The 
rationalists have been anxious to rid us of 
the necessity of resting our soul’s faith on 
the authority of Pope, apostle and prophet, 
Church Council and Sacred Book; and 
their anxiety is well founded; but if the 
only alternative they offer us is an equally 
blind acceptance (and for most of us it must 
be blind) of the authority of scientist and 


F 


66 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


metaphysician, I am not sure that we are 
not worse off than we were before. Surely 
there is something quite grotesque about 
this idea of going to the scientists for our 
religion. There are many tight corners in 
life when you and I are glad enough to have 
the scientists at our elbow ; but where the 
soul’s fundamental faith is concerned, I, 
for one, would still prefer to put my trust 
in a Jeremiah or a Paul or an Augustine or 
a Francis. Of course some rationalists 
will protest, in their superior way, that 
there is no need for any man to take his 
philosophy entirely at second-hand. Every 
man is a philosopher in his own little way 
and degree, though it is only the scientifi- 
cally trained expert who can hope to possess 
a philosophy that is either secure in its 
foundations or reliable in its results. This 
explanation, however, does not meet our 
difficulty in the least; for it would still 
remain true that a really luminous and 


SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS 67 


robust religious faith would be in the 
possession of philosophers alone. And that 
is a notion which is not only in the last 
degree unwelcome and incongruous but is 
also contradicted by all our experience of 
life. No view of religion can possibly be 
correct which makes it depend on science 
or learning of any kind, because nothing 
is more certain than that the world’s great 
men of faith—those members of our race 
whose religious insight has been surest and 
clearest and bravest—have, as often as not, 
been men of little learning and less science. 
As an old teacher of my own ! used to say, 
and it is a sentiment which might be taken 
as the first axiom of any true theology: 
“ The basis of our faith must be such as to 
be grasped in the same independent fashion 
by learned and unlearned, and by each for 
himself.” 


1 Wilhelm Herrmann. See his Communion with God, 
English translation, Revised Edition, p. 76 


68 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


To sum up still more briefly, then, we 
might say that although religion has some- 
thing in common with metaphysics, it 
cannot possibly be just another name for 
metaphysical speculation as such; first, 
because such speculation is largely remote 
from the ordinary man’s interests and 
beyond his powers; secondly, because even 
if it were in line with his interests, and 
within his powers, it could yield neither 
the degree nor the kind of certainty 
necessary for religion to feed upon; and 
thirdly, because that kind of knowledge 
which only scientifically trained phil- 
osophers can have in perfection is obviously 
not what has been known in the world as 
religious faith. 


IV 


What then is the essence of religion, 
if it is not philosophical speculation ? Well, 


SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS _ 69 


at the opposite extreme from the rational- 
ists, we have, during the last century and 
a quarter, had the romanticists. Romantic- 
ism, aS you know, is a movement which 
came into being about the beginning of the 
nineteenth century in direct opposition 
to the rationalism which had had its heyday 
during the previous hundred years; and 
what it did was to swing the pendulum of 
thought about as far in the opposite 
direction as it could be made to go. Indeed 
we here seem to come upon a very significant 
fact, and that is that the men of our time 
have, for the most part, found it much easier 
to see the defects of the old rationalism 
than to know exactly what to put in its 
place. Perhaps, however, we may say 
that the most characteristic form in which 
romanticism has appeared has been the 
attempt to oust reason altogether from its 
ancient throne and put feeling in its place. 
At the beginning of the nineteenth century 


70 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


this substitution of feeling for reason was 
represented in many different spheres—in 
poetry, in music, in ethics, in political 
theory. Here we are concerned only with 
its application to the religious problem ; 
and the great name in this region is that 
of Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose view it 
was that religion consisted, not in anything 
like philosophical theorising, but purely in 
feeling, and particularly (as he said) in the 
feeling which we have of being absolutely 
dependent on something other than our- 
selves. 

It is worth while to follow this great 
thinker—in many ways the greatest of all 
modern students of religion—a little more 
into the details of his view. It is quite a 
mistake, he tells us, to look upon religion 
as a child of the reason. In itself it has 
nothing to do with reason, or with thinking, 
or with any kind of ideas or beliefs. Far 
deeper than any of these it strikes its roots 


SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS 71 


into the underlying region of immediate 
feeling. According to traditional psycho- 
logy, as you know, our mental life has three 
sides to it—knowing, feeling and willing ; 
and Schleiermacher’s contention is that, 
just as the first of these gives rise to science 
and the third to morality, so the second— 
feeling—has given rise to religion. The 
awareness of God’s reality is thus not a 
knowledge of Him reached by reflection, 
but an immediate feeling of dependence 
upon Him. Religion is “a sense and taste 
for the Infinite’’; ‘‘a feeling of absolute 
dependence, which is the same as to say a 
feeling of being in touch with God.” What 
is called religious knowledge is, on this 
view, a purely secondary affair, and is no 
more than an attempt on the part of later 
reflection to describe what one has already 
felt. It is theology, not religion; and 
religion must always precede theology and 
is entirely possible without it. Not even 


72 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


the idea of God is necessary to religion 
itself: all that is necessary to it is that 
“the Deity should be present to man in 
feeling.’ 1 You will see at once how 
complete is the break which romanticism 
here makes with rationalism. The latter 
had identified religion with speculative 
philosophy ; the former now identifies it 
with an immediate stirring of the soul which 
precedes the earliest beginnings of reflective 
thought. The one had grounded our belief 
in God’s reality on difficult theistic argu- 
ments drawn from astronomy (Plato), 
biology (Paley), or epistemology (Berkeley) ; 
the other now grounds it on the feeling 
that we have of Him in our souls. 

This view of religion as consisting in pure 
feeling merits our greater attention because, 
since about the year 1890, it has been given 

1 Cf, the second speech (‘The Nature of Religion”) in 

Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion, of which 


there is an English translation by Dr Oman: also 
the introduction to Der christliche Glaube. 


SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS 73 


a new lease of life by those American 
writers who have occupied themselves with 
what they have called the “‘ Psychology of 
Religion.” The majority of these writers 
follow Schleiermacher’s view almost to the 
ietter; J yet, ‘as LL think; ;without’ ever 
attaining to so clear and rigidly-argued a 
presentation of it as is to be found in his 
pages; and also without much apparent 
awareness of the fact that they are here 
re-traversing comparatively old ground. 
This, for instance, is what William James, 
the intellectual father of this movement, 
writes : 


“The intellectualism in religion 
which I wish to discredit pretends 
to . . . construct religious objects 
out of the resources of the logical 
reason alone, or of logical reason 
drawing rigorous inference from non- 
subjective facts.” 


Whereas in reality, 


74 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


“Feeling is the deeper source of 
religion, and philosophic and theo- 
logical formulze are secondary products, 
like translations of a text into another 
tongue.” 


All religious ideas, dogmas and creeds are 
thus intellectual constructions which 


‘“‘ pre-suppose immediate experiences 
as their subject-matter. They are in- 
terpretative and inductive operations, 
operations after the fact, consequent 
upon religious feeling, not co-ordinate 
with it, not independent of what it 
contains.” 4 


V 


What then are we to say about this 
view? Well, we shall perhaps all feel 
some degree of sympathy with the intention 
ofit. Atthe very least it isa brave attempt 


1 These passages will all be found in James’ Varieties of 
Religious Experience, pp. 431-433. 


SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS 75 


to provide a way of escape from the barren 
and arid confines of a purely rationalistic 
outlook. But the trouble is that the 
escape it offers seems, on closer examination, 
to be only into a land of fog and cloud. 

The fact is that religion has come to a 
sorry pass if it is driven to take refuge in 
nothing more solid than our feelings. 
Feeling is indeed an entirely necessary 
element in all noble forms of life, but 
feeling by itself has neither nobility nor 
dignity, neither usefulness nor value. 
Thought is the proper guide of feeling, 
and it is only so far as feeling is held in 
leash by intelligent insight and reflection 
that it is worthy of any measure of respect 
at all. Feeling that has not been subjected 
to the surveillance and control of such 
reflective insight we call sentimentality ; 
and sentimentality is as little admirable, 
and as much a thing to be avoided, in 
religion as in any other activity engaged in 


76 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


by intelligent beings, whether music or 
poetry, politics or economics. Furthermore, 
if we relegate religion to the realm of mere 
feeling, we are cutting it off from all claim 
to objective truth. That is just the trouble 
with sentimentality, that it lacks reality. 
Our feelings are merely our feelings, and 
that is all about them. It is the cognitive 
activity of mind that alone puts us in touch 
with a reality which is other and greater 
than ourselves ; the affective aspect (which 
is the psychologist’s name for feeling) is 
the very hall-mark of subjectivity. “ Oh, 
it’s merely his feeling! ’’ we say, when we 
wish to discredit anybody’s opinion. As 
Wilhelm Herrmann used to put it, “ To 
say that religion is merely feeling is much 
too like what its worst enemies have always 
said about it to be anything but a very left- 
handed apologetic.”” And indeed the truth 
is that in withdrawing our soul’s faith into 
this purely private sphere, we are certainly 


SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS 77 


sheltering it from the criticism of reflective 
intelligence, but only at the cost of 
giving our thinking contemporaries a 
perfectly good reason for ignoring it 
altogether. 

Yet I should not like to leave the matter 
there. It would not be wise to content 
ourselves with showing that those who 
identify religion with mere feeling are doing 
Serious disservice to religion ; for there are 
some to whom such disservice would be in 
no wise unwelcome. Let me therefore add 
that besides doing disservice to religion 
these theorists are also doing considerable 
violence to psychological fact. In reality 
there is no such thing as mere feeling. 
Pure feeling, as somebody has said, is pure 
nonsense. If you consult any history of 
psychology, you will see that what 
characterised the psychology of romantic- 
ism was just this attempt to place feeling 
deeper down, as it were, in our mental life 


78 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


than knowledge and will. Of the three 
elements of mentality, it was argued, 
“feeling alone is primordial,” and 
knowledge on the one hand and will on the 
other arise out of this feeling as secondary 
developments. This was the psychological 
doctrine on which Schleiermacher was 
building, but it is one that has long ago 
fallen a prey to advancing science. It 1s 
now recognised that no feeling can be 
conceived as existing prior to all cognition. 
You can never have a feeling which is not 
a feeling of something. Feeling, indeed, 
is nothing but our subjective response to 
external stimuli, and we must first be 
cognitively aware of the stimuli before we 
can be affected by them to pleasure or pain. 
As Professor James Ward puts it in his 
Psychological Principles, ‘““ We have not 
jirst a change of feeling and then a change 
in our sensations, perceptions and ideas ; 
but, these changing, change of feeling 


SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS 79 


follows.”’ 1 This being so, it is clear that 
feeling can never be independent of know- 
ledge. When you get behind knowledge, you 
get behind feeling too. 

And if this be true of all feeling, it seems 
doubly true of religious feeling. For it 
would seem that this kind of feeling is 
dependent, not on cognition merely (which 
might mean only sense-perception), but on 
nothing less than reflective intelligence. I 
think common-sense recognises this. Surely 
it is because we are intelligent beings that 
we are religious beings. Non-rational 
animals are not religious, but, as far as we 
know, all animals which are rational are 
religious too. Hardly any kind of feelings, 
therefore, are more obviously mediated by 
the ideas present in our minds than are our 
religious feelings. When we see anybody 
moved to deep emotion, the question raised 
in our minds is always what has moved 


1 Psychological Principles, pp. 41-45. 


80 THE (ROOTS OF "RELIGION 


him ; and if it is a truly religious emotion 
that he is displaying, common sense is 
enough to tell us that what has moved him 
is not a mere bodily sensation, nor a sight 
or sound, but some idea in his mind. I 
said above that when you get behind 
knowledge, you get behind feeling too: I 
say now that when you get behind religious 
ideas, you also, and by the same sign, get 
behind religious feelings.+ 


VI 


This appeal from reason to feeling is the 
most characteristic and classical form in 
which the theology of romanticism has 
appeared, but it is by no means the only 
form. Indeed I should say that the essence 
of this theology is capable of being stated 
without reference to feeling at all. What 
characterises the romanticist theologians 


is just the attempt to find the roots of 
1 See Note on page 87, 


SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS 81 


religion somewhere in the mind below the 
level of reflective thought; and there is 
hardly any mental element or activity 
lying in this pre-rational region that has 
not, at some time or another during the 
last hundred years, been exploited in the 
interests of anti-rationalism. I shall here 
mention two of these. 

There are some among us who, instead of 
using the language of feeling to explain 
religion, would use the language of per- 
ception. Keligion they would tell us, is, 
in essence, neither thought nor feeling so 
much as immediate vision. It is possible, 
they say, to attain to a direct perception 
of God’s presence, and that is surely all the 
foundation that religion needs. It has 
thus been suggested that psychology should 
recognise a special religious sense. ‘‘ Those 
who know God,” says Coventry Patmore, 
a typical writer of this school, ‘ know that 


it is quite a mistake to suppose that there 
G 


82 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


are only five senses.” 1 It is natural that 
the literature of mysticism should be 
drawn upon in support of this type of view, 
and, as a matter of fact, nothing is more 
striking than the tendency of recent 
American writers on religion to appeal for 
their subject-matter, not to the normal 
religion of Jesus and Paul, Augustine and 
Luther, but to the more emotional and 
ecstatic and, as one cannot help saying, 
pathological type of piety represented by 
the extremer mystics. 

Is there, then, such a thing as religious 
vision ? Is it true that God is ever 
immediately present to the mind of man? 
I should myself be willing to answer “ yes ” 
to these questions, if you allowed me to go 
on at once to add that it is not to our 
senses that He is thus present but to our 
thoughts. But what a vital difference 
this addition makes! It is not a special 


1 The Rod, The Root and The Flower, p. 43 


SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS 83 


sense that will help us here, and the language 
of perception—even the language of the 
beatific vision itselfi—can only mislead us. 
God is a Spirit, and those who know Him 
truly know Him, not by sensuous, but by 
spiritual means. In religion we have to 
walk, not by sight, but by insight ; which 
is the same as to say by faith. And I 
would add this. Where the religious man 
differs from the non-religious man is not, 
if we speak accurately, that he has seen 
something which the other has not. God 
is not merely a stark fact that we may or 
may not have happened to notice, or that 
may or may not have happened to come 
our way ; nor are there any objects present 
to the saint’s perception which are not part 
of the common experience of us all. What 
is true is rather that what the saint has 
seen means something different to him, 
something immeasurably more. And why ? 
The answer is tremendously significant, 


84 THE ROOTS: OF RELIGION 


and I shall ask you to keep it in your 
minds against my next chapter. Any 
really sound mystic will tell you what it is. 
It is that he has a purer heart. ‘“‘ The pure 
in heart shall*see God.” 

About one other and very modern variety 
of romanticist theology I would speak a 
single word. During the last twenty or 
thirty years it has become very fashionable 
to appeal, not to feeling, nor to mystical 
vision, but to what is very vaguely called 
religious experience. Keligion, some writers 
will tell you, is a matter, not of thought 
and reflection, but of experience. Religious 
beliefs, they will say again, are but 
secondary products of religious experience, 
and have their only true ground and basis 
in such experience. Of writers of this 
school I think I have but one question to 
ask: what religious experience could there 
possibly be, or be imagined, that did not 
already contain a belief as an integral part 


SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS 85 


of its own being? I should say myself 
that the most fundamental and primordial 
of all religious experiences, and perhaps in 
a sense the only experience that is as such 
religious, is just the experience of believing, 
the experience of faith in God, the experi- 
ence of casting oneself in utter trust upon 
His love. 


VII 


There then—in the  sentimentalist, 
mystical! and experience theologies—we 
have three varieties of romanticism. Where 
they are all at one is in their endeavour to 
escape the absurdities of rationalism by 
relegating religion to some pre-rational 
region of our mental life. But they fall 
into absurdities of their own; and to them 
all we can but oppose our firm persuasion 
that no interpretation of religion can be 


worthy of its great object (or can help us 
1 See Note on page 88. 


86 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


in our present need) which does not exhibit 
it as a thing born of, and nourished by, the 
fullest daylight of human intelligence. 

If we regard current theological and 
philosophical literature as a whole, it may 
perhaps be said to be something lke 
equally divided on this very vital issue. 
Open a new book in which the matter is 
touched upon, and the chances are about 
even of finding it stated that religion and 
philosophy are two names for the same 
thing, or that the true seat of religion is 
far away from all philosophy in the under- 
ground recesses of the soul. And to my 
mind the honours of the controversy have 
been about equally divided too. Rational- 
ism seems to have been right in insisting 
that religion is grounded in intelligent 
insight, but wrong as to the sources of 
that insight. Romanticism seems to have 
been right in seeking a foundation for 
religion which should render it independent 


SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS 87 


of scientific and metaphysical speculation, 
but wrong in thinking to find such a 
foundation in some region of the mind that 
lies below the level of reflective thought. 


ADDITIONAL NOTES 


A. The meaning of “ feeling’ in Schletermacher. In 
the text I have assumed that when Schleiermacher 
says ‘‘ feeling ’’ he means to refer to the “ affective ”’ 
aspect of mental life which is distinguished by 
traditional psychology from cognition on the one 
hand and conation on the other. There is no doubt 
at all that this is Schleiermacher’s professed or 
official meaning—what he means to mean, as one 
might say. In stating his view he refers explicitly 
to the traditional tripartite division, which he calls 
“perception, feeling and activity ”’ (Reden, tr. Oman, 
p. 45). On the other hand, there is as little doubt 
that Schleiermacher, like so many other champions 
of romanticist theory, wins additional plausibility 
for his argument by taking advantage of the wide 
variety of looser associations which the word 
“ feeling ’’ is likely to call up in the ordinary reader’s 
mind. James Ward distinguishes no less than five 
different things which “ feeling’’ may be taken to 


“¢ 


mean: “‘ (a) a touch, as feeling of roughness; (b) 


88 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


an organic sensation, as feeling of hunger; (c) an 
emotion, as feeling of anger ; (d) any purely subjective 
state, as feeling of certainty or of activity; (e) the 
one subjective state that is purely ‘affective,’ as 
feeling of pleasure or pain.”” (Psychological Princtples, 
p. 41). And he goes on to show how romanticist 
psychology has constantly tended to make capital 
out of this possibility of equivocation. In 
Schleiermacher’s case it is plain enough that “ feeling 
of absolute dependence ’”’ has a sub-meaning which 
makes it equivalent to the phrase “ Anschauung des 
Universums,”’ “intuition of the Universe ’’—a sort 
of perceptive awareness of the Infinite. This meaning 
comes up for criticism in the following section of the 
chapter. 


B. Mystical Piety and the Mystical Theory of Religion. 
What I conceive myself to have criticised here and 
there in these lectures is not the type of piety which 
is often known as “ mysticism,” still less what is 
sometimes called the ‘‘ mystical element” in all 
religion, but much rather what might be called the 
mystical theory of religion. The Germans sometimes 
avoid ambiguity by making a distinction between 
Mystik and Mystizismus, the former denoting that 
well-marked current in our Western religious history 
represented by such names as the Mohammedan 
Sufis, Pseudo-Dionysius, Behmen, Santa Teresa, 
Swedenborg; the latter denoting that brand 
of the philosophy of religion which makes everything 
in religion turn on the immediate and esoteric 
character of the mystic vision. It is the latter alone 


SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS 89 


that I have made bold to criticise. Of the former I 
need only say that, while I do not believe it to 
represent the main stream of normal religious develop- 
ment, I do believe it to have again and again 
performed important service as a counter-current to 
the prevailing rationalism. I have made some 
acknowledgment of this service in the fifth chapter. 


CHAPTER ait 
WHAT RELIGION REALLY IS 


I 


/THE argument of the last chapter was 
that religion is, at heart, neither a matter 
of metaphysical speculation on the one 
hand nor a matter of ecstatic emotion 
, and esoteric mystical experience on the 
) other; and that therefore neither the 
| rationalistic nor the romanticist inter- 
| 
\ furnishing us with a satisfactory solution 


pretation of religion can be regarded as 


of our problem. 

I wish now, however, to call your 
attention to the fact that the romanticist 
view of religion is not the only alternative 
to rationalism which has been canvassed 


within the last hundred and fifty years. 
90 


WHAT RELIGION REALLY IS 91 


Many have indeed seemed to think 
that religion could save itself from the 
too embarrassing attentions of the meta- 
physicians only by withdrawing itself into 
the mysterious underground depths of our 
mental life and keeping company with none 
but the mystics. But there have always 
been others, less vociferous but, as I think, 
more numerous and representative, who 
had a different view to suggest. It is a 
view which can be put very simply, and 
is nothing else than this: (that religion 
is, in the inmost heart of it, an affair JP fegr oe 
y neither of ‘cosmological hypotheses nor of hat e+e 


unfamiliar psychical experiences, but rather - A tees UA tty) 
da we. pe seg Vi AA4) 
ALO PA 


trial. The essence of true piety, we are Aelia eh ( 
, yf ae at t_- 


now told, is just to fill one’ s little niche L 
7 A Loe ae 
with steadfast cheerfulness _ and courage, -<yire _. Pca 


an affair of conduct, of how one lives one’ Sy 
daily life and. faces one’s daily task and 


to seek to make real in our every word 
and deed the loftiest ideals that are revealed 


rl. CUA tt. LC aaa PD ree. SAN Aca eh. 
Mil oe “i. AOU Ope) - lie. EAC Ia Wve R 


F 


LORAR 
- ) & CL Aarts f 
‘t ~~ ke 4} 
) © orn ‘w fA 4 


ALL 


a: THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


to us and, in the soldier’s phrase, to “ do 


‘one’ s bit’ towards the making of a better 


Sota 

Those of you who are students of history 
will doubtless recall more than one tentative 
expression of this view of things appearing, 
as it were, right in the middle of the 


predominant rationalism of the eighteenth 


century. One needs _ Iittle learning; 
however, to be aware of its presence in 
the literature of the nineteenth century 
as a broadly-distributed tendency of 
thought. One classical expression of it 
is Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma, 
first published in 1873. In that work, 
as in so much else that he wrote, Arnold 
takes his stand from the outset upon the 
purely practical nature of religion. 
“Surely,” he exclaims, 

“Surely if there be anything with 


which metaphysics have nothing to 
do, and where a plain man, without 


WHAT RELIGION REALLY IS 93 


skill to walk in the arduous paths of\ ways. | Lick, Joby 
abstruse reasoning, may yet find} , hy 
himself at home, it is religion. For /4¢* 9 © LLG 
the object of religion is conduct;} ./ ¢ PENI Mgr ¢ 
and conduct is really, however man 5 / : 
may overlay it with philosophical \/, f(/ ,y4 , 
3 span een i * : eV Orth Cee 
disquisitions, the simplest thing in ,~ | rs 
tHesworld. Chathis ta’ say, it.is: the |? ye I. 
simplest thing in the world as far as | bis, C ’ 
understanding is concerned; as regards \ * 
doing, it is the hardest thing in the “ 
world.”’ 


He goes on: 


“ The antithesis between etiical and 
veligious is thus quite a false one. 
Ethical means Practical : 
Religious also means fractical, but 
practical in a still higher degree; 
and the right antithesis to both ethical 
and religious is the same as the right 
antithesis to practical: namely 
theoretical.’’} 


That is strongly put, but I should 


1 Literature and Dogma, Chapter I. 


94 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


myself be inclined to say that this tendency 
to look upon religion as being essentially 
and in the first place a practical thing is 
the most characteristic contribution which 
the last two or three generations have 
made to religious thought. And I believe 
it is hardly possible to exaggerate the 
extent to which, in our own generation, 
educated men generally have fallen back 
upon the position that all the religion a 
man needs is the religion of doing one’s 
duty, of being true to one’s ideals, or— 
in the phrase that so often came to us 
from the Front—of “ doing the right thing.” 
What matters, we are told, is not what 


yh hnetveut y {~ aa 
we believe but what we do ; and 
fred} ¢ Wee Christianity is, or ought to be, a way of 
Ax PS EYE a Etcbverpife rather than a way of thinking. Such _ 
DP bok 4 phrases keep recurring like a refrain in 
Q) fe a our modern literature; and the words of | 
IN IQO-A on Z 
| © John Stuart Blackie represent an ever- 
Font A thd. : ~ broadening sentiment : 


l 
§, Me ( VU ef > 


NAetl. {6 
Roth we rebhfhy 


Ph i fn Ade people Ako ae Ch 
fing SA . holafow No 


WHAT RELIGION REALLY IS 95 


“Let prideful priests do battle about 
creeds : 
The Church is mine that does most 
Christlike deeds.”’ 


I] 


What then are we to say about this 
third kind of view of religion? Well, I 
must myself confess that, in comparison 
with the other views we have had before 
us, I am at once struck with the great 
good sense of it. I feel that at last we 
are looking in something like the right 
direction. I feel that religion is, to say 
the very least, more a matter of deeds 
and of loyalties than it is a matter of 
high-flying metaphysics on the one hand 
or of mystical ecstasy on the other. And 
there is one thing which in particular 
seems to me to be clear, namely, that in 
any case loyalty is all that is required of 


96 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


us. It is not demanded of us that we 

should see visions or experience rapturous 

emotions. Such things may be given to 

us, but they are not asked of us. Nor 

. can the acceptance of doctrine be directly 
bly: 9 wf, rth ‘demanded of us. There may, in some 
Ro pry ele ay | sense, be a “ will’’ to believe, but there 
ne op. Ki never can be a “shall”’ to believe. (What 
ra) is demanded of us is oh that we fill our | 


BN a n Ds - 

at ets ay AG _appointed place, that we “do our bit,” 
NCTE oan that we be true to our highest insights of — 
lye U ut Ey nel duty and service. And, after all, what 
© (i Gat oS temepere \else i in life matters as compared with that ? 


IS SORE ~c- ““\ © This emphasis on the centrality of the 
practical or ethical element in religion is 
recelving more and more confirmation every 
day from the study of historic religion. 
On every hand we are being told that the 
end which religion has always had in view 
has been conduct rather than knowledge, 
and that such knowledge as it did 
seek after was primarily intended for the 


WHAT RELIGION REALLY IS 97 


guidance of conduct. Take for an example 
M. Durkheim’s massive researches into 
the earliest forms of religion known to us, 
as illustrated especially in the cults of the 
Central Australian tribes. The believer, 
he tells us, feels that 


“the real function of religion is not? 
to make us think, not to enrich our} 
knowledge, nor to add to the concep-, 
tions which we owe to science others) 
of another origin, but rather it is to 
make us act, to aid us to live.” 1 _/ 


Or take the no less elaborate studies that 
have recently been made of the more 
developed religions of Greece and Rome, 
and you will find one thing being very 
strongly emphasised about them—that 
what they demanded of men was not 
conformity of doctrine but conformity of 
conduct and of life. We might at first be 


1 Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, English 
translation, p. 416. 


H 


98 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


inclined to think that, however true this 
may be of the Greco-Roman tradition, it 
can hardly be asserted of the Semitic. 
But listen to what the greatest of all our 
modern Semitic scholars, Robertson Smith, 


wrote as early as 1889: 


“What is requisite to religion is a 
practical acquaintance with the rules 
on which the deity acts and on which 
He expects His worshippers to frame 
their conduct. . . . This is true even 
of the religion of Israel. When the 
prophets speak of the knowledge of 
God, they always mean a practical 
knowledge of the laws and principles 
of His government in Israel, and a 
summary expression for religion as a 
whole is the ‘ knowledge and fear of 
Jehovah,’ i.e. the knowledge of what 
Jehovah prescribes, combined with a 
reverent obedience,” } 


If we pass to the religion of Jesus and 


1 Religion of the Semites, p. 23. 


WHAT RELIGION REALLY IS 99 


Paul, we shall, I think, find a more insistent 
emphasis than ever laid upon well-doing. 
The more closely we read the Gospels, 
the more do we seem to become aware 
that the religion of Jesus, if indeed (as I 
shall presently find it necessary to insist) 
it cannot be said entirely to consist in the 
doing of one’s duty and the fulfilment of 
one’s appointed task, yet at least always 
revolves round these things. ‘‘ My meat,” 
He said, “‘is to do the will of Him that 
sent Me.” Or again, 


“You will know them by their 
fruit . . . Every good tree bears 
sound fruit, but a rotten tree bears 
bad fruit; a good tree cannot bear 
bad fruit, and a rotten tree cannot 
bear sound fruit. So you will know 
PueUe Oo Vvethely {rity .) oie Lops hia 
every one who says to me ‘Lord, 
Lord!’ who will get into the Realm 
of Heaven, but he who does the will 
of my Father in Heaven. Many will 


100 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


say to me at that day, ‘ Lord, Lord, 
did we not prophesy in your name? 
Did we not perform miracles in your 
name?” Then I will declare to them : 
I never knew you; depart from my 
presence, you workers of iniquity.” } 


Miracles and prophecy, the lore of demons 
and the ascription of honorific titles— 
these things had often been taken to lie 
right at the centre of religion. But to 
Jesus the centre of religion lies far elsewhere. 
It les in doing God’s will. The Kingdom 
of Heaven is not for those who are willing 
to call Jesus by a name of honour, but for 
those who do the will of His Father. If 
we judge by the existing records, there is 
hardly another sentiment which was as 
often upon His lips as this one. “‘ Why 
call ye me‘ ‘Lord, Lord .(; (Heysaidiaa 
one occasion, “‘and do not the things 
which I say?” ? And again: 


1 Matthew, vii, 16-23. Moffatt’s translation. 
2 Luke, vi, 46. 


WHAT RELIGION REALLY IS _ for 


“While He was saying this, a 
woman shouted to him out of the 
crowd, ‘Blessed is the womb that 
bore you and the breasts you sucked ! ’ 
But he said, ‘ Blessed rather are those 
who hear and who observe the word 
of God!’ 1 


Another favourite word of His (at least 
according to one of the Synoptic traditions) 
was ‘“‘righteousness,’’ and His consistent 
teaching was that righteousness was the 
one thing that mattered. Blessed, He 
said, are those who hunger and _ thirst 
aitenit: And, it was characteristic | of 
Him to pick out from the sacred literature 
of His people a saying that would seem 
to make conduct supreme in religion. 
“Go ye and learn what this saying means : 
I will have mercy and not sacrifice.” 
What Jesus here teaches is, in Dr. Moffatt’s 
words, that ‘‘ forgiveness and charity must 


1 Luke, xi, 27-28. Moffatt’s translation. 


102 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


not be allowed to stand aside on any 
pretext—not even on the pretext that 
worship has prior obligations.” ! 

What is here true of Jesus is no less true 
of Paul. His religion may be a many- 
sided thing, but there is never any question 
where its main weight lies. It too lies, 
not in right thinking, but in right doing. 
It too lies, not in miracles and prophecy 
and demonology, nor in mystery and 
ecstasy, but in the loving heart and the 
helping hand. Here is the centre of Paul’s 
Gospel : 


“Set your hearts on the higher 
talents. And yet I show unto you a 
still higher path. I may speak with 
the tongues of men and of angels, 
but if I have no love, I am a noisy 
gong or a clanging cymbal. I may 
prophesy, fathom all mysteries and 
secret lore, I may have such absolute 
faith that I can move hills from their 


1 The Theology of the Gospels, p. 105. 


ae 


WHAT RELIGION REALLY IS _ 103 


place, but if I have no love, I count 
for nothing.” ! 


He concludes the passage—the most famous 


he ever wrote—by boldly setting love 
above faith and hope. “ Faith and hope 
and love last on, these three, but the 
greatest of all is love.”’ All through the 
New Testament the same teaching will be 
found. Hear this from the first Epistle 
to Iimothy: 


“Warn certain individuals against 
teaching novelties and studying myths 
and interminable genealogies; such 
studies bear upon speculations rather 
than on the divine order which belongs 
to faith. Whereas the aim of the 
Christian discipline is the love that 
springs from a pure heart, from a 
good conscience, and from an 
unhypocritical faith,” 2 


1 I Corinthians, xii, 31—xiii, 2. Moffatt’s translation. 
* I Timothy, i, 3-5. Moffatt’s translation, except for 


the word unhypocritical. The Greek is dyvmoxptrov. 
Moffatt gives sincere. 


104 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


III 

It seems to me quite clear, then, that 
in thus linking up religion with goodness 
and duty, with our ideals and our loyalties, 
we are for the first time hitting the trail 
that leads to a satisfactory solution of our 
problem. But are we now to say simply, 
with the writers whom I began by quoting, 
that religion is just the doing of one’s 
duty and nothing more? Is religion, when 
stripped of all its accidental accompani- 
ments and unnecessary adornments, merely 
another name for morality ? To do each 
moment the duty that lies nearest one, to 
obey the leadings of conscience, to serve 
one’s day and generation with a loyalty 
that asks no questions, to follow the gleam 
of the ideal—is that all that is meant by 
being religious ? 

You will all agree with me that it is not. 
Religion, you will all feel, though it includes 
noble living, is nevertheless something 





WHAT RELIGION REALLY IS 105 


more than noble living. Indeed you will 
probably wish to have me say that noble 
living, taken by itself, is not religion at 
all, but only what, in contradistinction to 
religion, we call morality. I am a little 
shy about making the distinction quite so 
sharp as this. I prefer to think of religion 
as including all that we mean by morality, 
just as I am sure that the Gospel of Jesus 
includes all that we mean by noble living. 
It includes it, and puts it right at its 
centre ; but it includes something more too. 

What is this something more ? Perhaps 
we may get a first hint as to its nature by 
glancing at some of the more militant 
attempts which have been made to deny 
its existence and to confine religion strictly 
within the limits of a purely social and 
humanitarian outlook. The most celebrated 
of such attempts was that made early in 
the nineteenth century by Auguste Comte. 
According to this distinguished French 


106 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


thinker the religion of the future must 
concern itself only with our human society 
on earth, and must never again venture 
to lift its gaze to the impenetrable Beyond. 
Piety, he says, has in itself nothing to do 
with the Beyond, or with any super- 
human reality. Humanity is its only 
worthy object of worship, its only God, its 
only Grand Etre. He admits that the 
religion of the past has commonly failed to 
confine itself within such limits and has 
seemed to centre itself in the faith in a 
super-social Deity who made all things 
work together for the good of His human 
children; but he looks upon this 
*““ theological ’’ tendency as marking only a 
passing stage which religion must eventually 
outgrow, and speaks of it as a mere 
“regency of God during the long minority 
of Humanity.” In our own day this 
sociocratic theory of religion (as it has 
been called) has received not only a new 


WHAT) RELIGIONY REALLY IS "107 


lease of life, but also considerable develop- 
ment, at the hands of certain French 
and American sociologists. The most 
distinguished name in this connection is 
that of Comte’s countryman, M. Emile 
Durkheim, whom I have already mentioned 
as one of the greatest living students of 
primitive religion, and who first made bold 
to simplify the Comtian position by 
denying roundly that there ever was a 
super-human Regent in religion. It is 
precisely among the most primitive peoples, 
Durkheim claims, that the purely social 
nature of religion is most plainly evident. 
Religion has, at heart, never been anything 
more than the response produced in the 
mind of the individual by the thought of 
the social organism to which he belongs. 
Humanity’s earliest god was the clan. As 
he puts it: 


“The god of the clan, the totemic 
principle, can be nothing else than the 


108 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


clan itself, personified and represented 
to the imagination under the visible 
form of the animal or vegetable which 
serves as totem.” 4 


In America at the present moment this 
purely sociocratic reading of religion is 
being keenly canvassed by a considerable 
group of scholars, teachers, and even 
preachers. Chicago seems to be the head- 
quarters of this movement, and the name 
of Dr. Edward Scribner Ames may perhaps 
be singled out as one of its most typical 
representatives. We can know nothing, 
they say, about the Unseen World that is 
beyond us, and it is wiser not to put any 
trust in its power or will to help us. Let 
us trust only Humanity, and let us worship 
only Humanity. Let us cling to our social 
values. Let us be loyal to Ideal Society 
and pay homage to it, as we pay homage 


1 Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, English 
translation, p. 2006. 


WHAT RELIGION REALLY IS _ 109 


to our Flag or our Alma Mater, which are 
also ideal entities. I remember as a 
student in Germany hearing a not dissimilar 
view championed by the distinguished 
neo-Kantian philosopher, Paul Natorp. 
Natorp, like Comte, derived from Kant ; 
but wished, just as Comte did, to leave one 
half of Kant’s philosophy standing, while 
utterly demolishing the other. He has 
written a book entitled Religion within the 
Limits of Humanity, in which his teaching 
is—I quote his words—“ religion, or that 
which has up to the present concealed 
itself under that name, is to be retained 
only, and strictly, in such measure as it 
confines itself within the limits of 
Humanity.” 4 

Now to my thinking the very statement 
of a position of this sort, far from convincing 
us, tends rather, by reaction, to make us 


1 Religion innerhalb dey Grenzen dey Humanitat, 2 Aufl, 
Pp. 49. 


IIO THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


feel at once where it is that the true 
religious outlook carries us beyond such a 
purely social and humanistic attitude to 
life as is here recommended to us. Perhaps 
we may put it very simply as follows. 
Perhaps we may say that what religion 
stands for is not merely the performance 
of our duty and unswerving allegiance to 
our social standards, but also, and quite 
characteristically, the sense and _ the 
assurance that in doing our duty and in 
abiding by our standards we somehow have 
the very Heart and Soul of things with us 
and are aligning ourselves with the Eternal. 
It is just here, in this assurance, that we | 


ce 


come upon that “something more” of 
which we are in search and which gives to 
religion its specific character. And we 
cannot but be aware at once of the immense 
and significant spiritual difference for which 
such an assurance must stand. To seek 


to realise the highest values which life has 


WHAT RELIGION REALE Y VIS: i xxr 


disclosed to us, to be ever reaching out 
after the ever unrealised ideal—that is 
indeed a heroic outlook; but, taken by 
itself, it is not the highest outlook. To 
regard our best-prized virtues and our 
loftiest aims in life as mere original 
inventions on man’s part, ideals which he 
has of his own original preference set before 
himself to attain and which merely hang, 
as it were, suspended in the airy unsub- 
stantiality of his day-dreams until (and 
unless) they are realised in his own conduct 
—such a view may greatly ennoble our 
living; but it falls short of the highest 
attitude to life. The highest outlook and 
attitude are those which take our values, 
not as inventions, but rather as revelations ; 
as our best and most veridical clues to the 
nature of the System to which we belong ; 
as representing not merely our purposes 
but the Universe’s Purpose for us; as 
being not merely a meaning which we 


112 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


import into our lives, but rather a meaning 
which we find in them. And it is this 
outlook and attitude which are the essence 
of religion. Its great and abiding 
superiority over any merely moral or social 
or humanistic outlook lies in the sense 
it gives us of being at home in the Universe. 
To the man in whose heart there is any 
germ or grain, even as a mustard-seed, of 
religious faith, the Universe is, at the 
heart of it, no bleak and foreign wilderness 
in which he, with his ideals of righteousness 
and love and faithfulness, is a forlorn and 
unheeded stranger. Still less is it an 
angry sea, ready to devour him and to 
swallow up for ever all that he holds dear. 
Rather does it seem to him as his father’s 
house; and he feels, as St. Paul long ago 
felt, that he is no longer a slave in it, but 
a son; and ifason, then an heir. 

Shall we now attempt a definition ? 
Shall we say that religion 1s a consciousness 


WHAT RELIGION REALLY IS 113 


which comes to the dutiful, to the loyal, to 
those who are true to the highest values they 
know, that in being thus dutiful and loyal 
to their values, they are doing what they 
were meant and appointed to do, and are 
putting themselves in line with the Eternal 
and have His backing behind them ? 

Such a definition, at all events, seems to 
me to correspond exactly with the teaching 
and with the temper of Jesus Christ. We 
saw how Jesus always put the doing of 
one’s duty, the performance of one’s task 
in life, and the hunger for perfect righteous- 
ness, at the very heart of His message ; 
and at first we might be misled into 
thinking that, in so doing, He was reducing 
religion to that very modern thing, ‘‘ mere 
morality.” There seems little doubt that 
His fondness for an Old Testament saying 
like ‘‘ I will have mercy, and not sacrifice ”’ 
was misunderstood in this way by some of 


His clerical contemporaries. But let us 
I 


114 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


read His words again, and more carefully. 
Then we shall see that duty in His mind is 
always a divinely-sanctioned duty, that 
the task of life is to Him always a task 
appointed, and that the righteousness of 
which He speaks is no mere man-made 
code but is God’s righteousness. His meat, 
He said, was to do the will of Him that 
sent Him. And what is there in life that 
is more blessed and precious than this 
consciousness, which Jesus had so strongly, 
of being sent; and of being sent, not 
merely in the abstract, but sent to do this 
bit of work that lies before us? Or again, 
instead of speaking merely of the service 
of society, He lifts the matter up to an 
altogether higher plane and says: “ He 
who does the will of my Father in Heaven.” 
When He speaks of righteousness, what 
He says is: ‘‘ Seek ye first the Kingdom of 
God and His righteousness.”’ And every- 
where the note of His teaching and of His 


WHAT RELIGION REALLY IS 115 


life, is this one note. Never was any view 
of life further from what we are wont to 
call mere morality than was that of Jesus. 
Righteousness and love and meekness, the 
discipline of self and the service of others— 
these were to Him no mere social inventions 
or conventions; they were laws of the 
Eternal Realm. As one of the greatest of 
His followers soon afterwards put it, ‘‘ The 
Kingdom of God is . . . righteousness 
and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” } 

You remember how I quoted Matthew 
Arnold as seeming almost, in some things 
that he said, to reduce religion to mere 
morality or good conduct’ without 
remainder. Arnold, however, was too great 
aman to rest content with such a conclusion, 
and so we find him seeking at once to put 
his finger on some respect in which religion 
carries us beyond the merely moral outlook. 
His first attempt, though it has gained 


1 Romans, xiv, 17. 


116 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


considerable notoriety, is not a very happy 
one. ‘‘ The true meaning of religion,” he 
says, “‘is not merely morality, but morality 
touched by emotion.’ We shall all feel, I 
think, that morality touched by emotion 
is still only morality, and that, if quite 
untouched by emotion, it would be as 
little morality as it would be religion. 
Arnold’s next suggestion, however, is of 
a very different order and points, as we 
cannot but feel, altogether in the right 
direction. What characterises religion, he 
now tells us, is its belief, not merely in the 
rightness of righteousness, but in ‘“‘ a power 
not ourselves, that makes for righteous- 
ness.” “‘ That root and ground of religion,” 
he writes, “that element of awe and 
gratitude which fills religion with emotion 
and makes it other and greater than 
morality—the not ourselves.” + It is true 
that on Arnold’s lips the phrase has always 


1 Literature and Dogma, Chapter VIII, 1. 


W Eee LIGION? RRALEY tis ve 117 


something of a meagre, and even perhaps 
of a Comtian, sound about it; for Comte 
too was well aware that everything in 
religion turned upon the reality of some 
“ Power without us’”’ on which we could 
lean, though unfortunately he cheated 
himself with the belief that he could find 
such a Power within the circle of our 
merely human life. If, however, we put 
aside all such meaner undertones, and take 
Arnold’s words in their most generous 
meaning, then indeed we may accept his 
phrase as leading us to the true heart of 
the matter. It may even remind us of 
another and greater and older phrase—a 
little sentence rather—, which St. Paul long 
ago addressed to the newly-founded Church 
at Corinth, and which has often seemed to 
me to have well-nigh the whole meaning 
of religion contained in itself alone. “ Ye 
are not your own,” he said to them. 
Whose then were they, if they were not 


118 THE (ROOTS (ORtREDIGION 


their own ? The answer is that they were 
the Eternal’s, that they belonged to the 
Power that made and moves the worlds. 
And which of us, who has ever taken his 
life in earnest, does not know what it means 
to feel that our lives are not ours to do 
with as we please, and that in a deep 
sense we are not our own property, but 
belong to Something or Someone infinitely 
greater and better and more significant 
than ourselves? Of course it is plain to 
all, and is admitted even by the stoutest 
opponents of religious faith, like Mr. 
Bertrand Russell, that we belong to the 
Almighty System, in which we stand 
enmeshed, in the sense of being physically 
in its power. But what Mr. Russell denies 
is that this system exercises any moral 
claim upon us. Weare just and honourable 
and kind, he says, not because these things 
are demanded of us, but because we 
demand them of ourselves. It isin defiance 


Wi REVIGIONWRBALE Y isi \t19 


of That from which we flow, not in 
obedience to it, that (as he sees it) we 
strive to live our lives aright. Well, faith 
rests upon the opposite insight—upon the 
insight that you and I are here, neither 
to shake our fists at the Eternal in 
defiance, nor to exploit it for our own petty 
purposes, but to serve it, or rather Him, in 
love. 

The view of religion to which we have 
thus been led may now be summed up very 
briefly. Religion is, essentially, a product of 
our consciousness of value: it is an outlook 
on things which arises, characteristically, 
in the doing of one’s duty—which grows 
up in the hearts of those who love 
whatsoever things are true and honest 
and just and pure and lovely and of good 
report and who, if there be any virtue and 
if there be any praise, think on these 
things and do them. Yet religion is more 
than the consciousness of value and more 


120 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


than the love of goodness. It has to do, 
rather, with the relation of value to reality, 
with what Socrates and Plato long ago 
called ‘‘ the identity of goodness and being.” 
Dean Inge has spoken of it as a “ confidence 
in the reality of things hoped for and the 
hopefulness of things real.” 1 My own 
master in philosophy, Professor Pringle- 
Pattison, has spoken of it as “‘ the worship 
of the ideal conceived as the eternally 
real, or (to put the same thing from the 
other side) the worship of the real conceived 
as good.’ # All the religion that is in the 
world to-day has its ultimate root and 
ground in this one irresistible conviction 
which comes (for the moment we need 
not ask how) to upward-striving mortals, 
that in such values as those of love and 
honour and purity and living for others 
they are striking the rock-bottom of reality 


1 Outspoken Essays, First Series, p. 170. 
2 See Hibbert Journal, October 1915. 


WHA POR ELIGIONVREALE WiIS*/ ir2r 


and are lighting upon the real key to the 
meaning and purpose of life—of the Cosmic 
Order as a whole and of their place in it. 
Here, then, we come upon the true head- 
waters of world-religion. From this single, 
simple source flow all the cults and all the 
creeds, which are but so many different 
attempts to interpret the real order of 
things in terms of the highest values which 
experience reveals to us. Start from any 
point you choose in the vast and varied 
phenomenology of human religion, and dig 
down to its ultimate foundations in human 
experience, and what will you find but the 
soul’s deep persuasion that it is reading 
the dark face of things most wisely and 
most truly when it reads it in terms of 
love and duty and the things that matter ? 
I take it to be one of the best established 
facts of universal history that in the hearts 
of those who love goodness there grows up 
a great sense of trust in an Eternal 


122 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


Goodness. That fact, with what follows 
from it, is all we mean by religion. 


”, 

In the last chapter I gave you some 
historical references for the two great 
types of interpretation of religion which 
we were then discussing, and so it is fitting 
that I should also mention some names in 
connection with the view of religion which 
I am now commending to you. It was 
adumbrated long ago by Plato in his 
doctrine of the Good, but the implications 
of what Plato says about the identity of 
goodness and existence were never fully 
realised either in the ancient or in the 
medieval world. And so this view of 
religion appears as a characteristically 
modern one, and is based on what is 
perhaps the most distinctive original insight 
which modern thought has contributed to 


WHA ORI hiGlON: REALE Yas. gr28 


the problem of life as a whole. You can 
trace its scattered and unsystematic 
beginnings throughout the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries—in Pascal and 
Rousseau, and in a different way in 
Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Tractate and 
in some of the so-called “ Deistic ”’ writings. 
But for its great original genius it had to 
wait for Immanuel Kant. It was Kant 
who first clearly set it forth that religion 
is essentially a product of our consciousness 
of value, having to do with the relation of 
value to reality. That is the fundamental 
insight round which Kant’s_ whole 
philosophy is built, and it is a pleasure to 
notice how early it was fixed in his mind. 
In a little book called Dreams of a Spinit- 
seer and published as early as 1766 (fifteen 
years before the publication of the first 
of the famous Cy7tiques), he writes as 
follows with reference to faith in a future 
life : 


124 


THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


“It seems more in accordance with 
human nature and with the purity 
of morals to base the expectation of a 
future world on the sentiments of 
a well-behaved soul, than contrari- 
wise to base its good behaviour on 
the hope of another world. We are 
thus left with moral faith, the 
simplicity of which can be superior 
to many a subtlety of argumentation, 
and which is alone suited to men of 
every condition, inasmuch as it leads 
them in no roundabout way to their 
true endsy\ + 


In these words we already seem to hear a 


truer note struck than any that had for 


long been heard in the academic study of 


religion. How good it is to see the truth 


of religion grounded at last neither upon 


cosmological, teleological and ontological 


demonstrations on the one hand, nor upon 


esoteric mystic visions on the other, but 


1 See the closing paragraph of Trdume eines Geistersehers. 


WHAT RELIGION REALLY IS 125 


upon “the sentiments of a well-behaved 
soul ! ”’ 

To attempt to compress the essence of 
Kant’s teaching into a few sentences is 
perhaps to be too bold; but I shall take 
my courage in my hands. Kant accepts 
fully the claims of natural—perhaps I 
should say of Newtonian—science to give 
us reliable and authoritative information 
concerning the phenomena with which it 
deals, but he is entirely sceptical as to the 
possibility of successfully extending the 
operations of science in such a way as 
make them yield any answers to our 
ultimate questionings concerning the nature 
and meaning of the Universe as a whole. 
Learned investigation, he believes, is never 
likely to shed any light at all on these high 
matters. Yet it is precisely about these 
high matters that some assured knowledge 
is practically most vital to us. Whether 
or not this chemical equation or that 


126 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


law of electrodynamics is correct may 
be important enough to us in certain 
minor respects, but what the meaning of 
existence is and what our relation to “ the 
scheme of things entire ’’ is to be taken to 
be—these questions concern the very roots 
of all our being. Now it was Kant’s 
belief that in the answering of these 
questions the scientist and metaphysician 
are at no greater advantage than the 
simplest and most unlettered of men. What 
counts here is not great learning but a 
pure and simple heart; not scientific 
cleverness but moral discernment. In the 
doing of our duty there comes to us, if 
not exactly the knowledge which science 
could not give us, yet a confident and 
trustful faith which, for all practical 
purposes, will serve in its stead. The 
duty-loving man finds himself believing 
that there is, at the bottom,—and the 
words are Kant’s own—‘‘a harmony 


WHAT RELIGION REALLY IS » 127 


between nature and morality.” That belief 
is what is known to the world as religion. 
Religious faith,’ says Kant, is nothing 
but “trust in the promise of the moral 
law ’’—trust, that is to say, that conscience 
will prove no lying voice, and love and 
selfless service no blind guides to the 
ultimate meaning of the giant system of 
things in which we find ourselves involved. 

This great discernment of Kant’s!? first 
received notable development and elabora- 
tion at the hands of a number of 
distinguished countrymen of his own— 
Fichte and Lotze and, above all, Albrecht 
Ritschl and his widely influential school 
of followers. Ritschl, like Kant, took his 
stand upon the determinative connection 
which he saw to exist between our religious 
faith and our consciousness of value. 
“Religious knowledge,’ he tells us, 
“consists in independent value-judgments, 


1 See Note on page 135. 


128 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


inasmuch as it deals with the relation 
between the blessedness which is assured 
by God and sought by man, and the whole 
of the world which God has created and 
rules in harmony with His final end.’’} 
By the end of the nineteenth century, 
however, there was hardly any country in 
which a view of this kind was not 
represented by a number of illustrious 
names. In France, for example, there 
was Auguste Sabatier and his school of 
Symbolo-fideists, as they called themselves ; 
in Denmark there was Harald Hoffding ; 
in Holland, Rauwenhoff; in Switzerland, 
Gaston Frommel. Possibly no formulation 
has attained wider currency than that of 
H6ffding who has defined religion as “‘ faith 
in the conservation of value.”’ More fully: 

“The religious problem proper 


begins where Comte’s religion ends, 
viz., at the question as to how the 


1 Rechifertigung und Versdhnung, Vol. III, English 
translation, p. 207. 


WHat RELIGION; REALLY +15. :\129 


development of the world is related 
to that of the human race and to that 
of the human ideal.”’ 

“The relation between value ann 
reality is the sphere in which religiod 
finds its home, in distinction from 
other experiences which are concerned 
only with values or only with reality.’’ 

“The essence of all religion consists 
not in the solution of riddles, but in 
the conviction that value will be 
preserved.’’ ! 


In England and America we have 
somewhat suffered from the fact that 
this general tendency of thought has been 
so largely represented among us by 
extremists of one kind or another. They 
have had extremists in other countries 
too—Vaihinger in Germany, Le Roy and 
the other philosophers of Roman Catholic 
modernism in France. But in our English- 
speaking world, when one speaks of faith 

1 Philosophy of Religion, English translation, pp. 359, 


243, 206. 
K 


130 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


having its source in our consciousness of 
value, it is of so very extreme and 
unbalanced a movement as pragmatism 
that people are apt to think. Yet even 
from the extremists there is something to 
be learned. Read William James’ Wall 
to Belseve, Dr. Schiller’s Problems of Belief, 
Lord Balfour’s older Foundations of Belief 
and Father Tyrrell’s Essays on Faith and 
Immortality, and, however blundering and 
even wrong-headed much of what you 
there find may seem to you, you can 
hardly, I think, escape the sense of being 
in the presence of some new thing which 
our age is gropingly trying to say about 
the foundations of our ultimate beliefs. 


Vi 


I shall conclude our study by returning 
for a few minutes to our idea of religion 
as being a confidence in the reality of 


WHAT RELIGION REALLY IS 131 


goodness and the goodness of reality, 
and trying to see how this confidence 
works out in the actual detail of belief. 
The most general result that flows from 
it is, as we have seen already, the sense 
that comes to the true-hearted and loyal 
of being at home in the Universe. They 
feel that That from Which they flow and 
in Whose hands their fate lies, is not 
indifferent to the things they have learned 
to love and value, but loves and values 
them too. They feel that in doing their 
duty they are doing what is wanted and 
expected of them, and putting themselves 
in line with something bigger and better 
than themselves. This is the beginning 
of what is meant by ‘Communion with 
God.” 

But besides thus giving us a more than 
human fellowship, the faith that our values 
are grounded in the real order of things 
gives us also a sense of more than human 


132 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


security. It saves us, and all that we care 
about, not only from spiritual isolation, 
but also from transiency and decay. This 
is what Héffding means when he speaks of 
religion as faith in the conservation of 
value, and what Professor Hocking of 
Harvard means by saying that, essentially, 
“the religious quest is a rebellion against 
the depotency of values.’’} In the hearts of 
those who have steadfastly sought after the 
highest good there has ever grown up the 
firm assurance that the All-environing 
Power will not play them false by destroying 
in the end, both themselves and all they | 
have toiled and striven to attain; but will 
rather see to it that nothing that is worthy 
to survive shall ever be lost; nay more, 

that, in Browning’s words, 
‘* All we have willed or hoped or dreamed 

of good shall exist ; 
Not its semblance, but itself; no 

beauty, nor good, nor power 
1 See The Journal of Religion, November, 1923. 


WHAT RELIGION REALLY IS. 133 


Whose voice has gone forth, but each 
survives for the melodist 

When eternity affirms the conception 
of an hour.” 


It is in this assurance that the great 
conception of Divine Providence takes its 
rise. It is here, too, that all the great 
eschatologies were born and, above all, 
the tremendous thought of human 
immortality. 

I need not tell you that the one com- 
prehensive conception in which all these 
thoughts and assurances are summed 
up is the conception of God. In every 
age and in every clime men of every race 
and of every tongue have felt that the 
good man could be at home in the Universe 
only if at the heart of it there be a living 
Spirit; and that it was only to a living 
Spirit that he could with any confidence 
entrust his values, Pity all noble seekers 


1 Abt Vogler, X. 


134 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


and leal-hearted workers, pity the true 
and the tender and the brave; pity them 
for lonely and miserable aliens existing 
only on sufferance in a heedless Universe ; 
pity truth and honour and heroism and 
chivalry and all things worthy of praise ; 
pity them for unsubstantial nothings 
destined soon to eternal oblivion—wzzmless 
God. The sense of God’s presence with us 
in the world, the sense of oneness with 
Him in the doing of our duty, the daily 
exploration of His loving designs for us, 
and the assurance of His eternal guardian- 
ship of the interests we hold most dear— 
that, finally, is what religion means. 

One unanswered question will remain in 
your minds. You will wish to know how 
this conviction of the reality of Eternal 
Goodness arises in the minds of those who 
hunger and thirst after such goodness as 
they know. You will wish to know 
exactly whence they obtain so great and 


WHAT RELIGION REALLY IS _ 135 


blessed an assurance. Perhaps someone 
will even ask whether, after all, they must 
not go to scientific metaphysics for it. 
mec lL can do, is to. repeat. that)’ on 
the contrary, I believe the most highly 
trained metaphysician to be no whit better 
off in respect of this knowledge and 
assurance than the humblest saint of God. 
For a more positive answer I must ask 
you to wait until the fifth and last of these 
chapters. Meanwhile, in the next chapter, 
I am anxious to raise with you the further 
question of the meaning, not now of 
religion as a whole, but of the Christian 
religion in particular. 


ADDITIONAL NOTE 


Kant and Schlevermacher. It so happens that in 
these lectures I had occasion to speak of Kant only 
in terms of praise and of Schleiermacher only in 
terms of criticism. This, however, was largely 
accidental and certainly does not mean that I am 


136 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


insensible either to Kant’s many defects or to 
Schleiermacher’sgreat positivecontributions. I should, 
indeed, say that, on the whole, modern theology 
has at least as much to learn from Schleiermacher 
as it has from Kant. Kant’s understanding of 
religion, however admirable in principle, is notoriously 
defective in its working out, and a book like Die 
Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft 
(which, however, is far from representing Kant at 
his best) compares as poorly as could be with the 
warmth and richness of the great Glaubenslehre, 
What the Ritschlians did was in large measure to 
combine the insights of Kant and Schleiermacher, 
while avoiding the outstanding defects of each. 
From Schleiermacher they got their initial impulse, 
their method, and their determination that religion 
be always allowed to speak for itself; from Kant 
they got their conviction that it is out of our 
consciousness of value (rather than out of any 
immediate “‘ sense and taste’”’ of God) that religion 
arises. But into all this I could not go in the course 
of a single lecture. 


CHAPTER IV 
WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 


I 


WE are now in possession of a fairly clear 
view as to the essential nature of religion, 
and it is a view which I think does 
something to clear up the problems which 
were raised in our minds in the first of 
these chapters. But there is one major 
problem that still remains to be faced, 
namely, the problem suggested by the 
great variety of religious creeds and of 
religious systems that there are in the 
world. It is easy to imagine some objector 
Saying to’ us ‘at this’ ‘point, “I .can 
understand religion, but I can’t make 
head or tail of the religions, nor have I any 


idea how I am to choose between them.”’ 
137 


138 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


And we can imagine another putting it 
thus: “I know now what the word 
religion stands for, but I am still quite in 
the dark as to what Christianity stands 
for, unless indeed it be no more than 
another name for the same thing.” To 
the problem here suggested I propose to 
devote the present chapter. 

Now there is no doubt that there is a way 
of conceiving the nature of a particular 
religion and the relation of the various 
particular religions to one another which 
renders this problem quite insoluble. A 
few generations ago it was very commonly 
supposed that the different religions stood 
for fundamentally different answers to the 
riddle of existence and that they were 
entitled to the common name of religion 
only because they were all answers, of one 
kind or another, to that riddle. Of these 
very multifarious answers, of course only 
one could be true, and all the others were 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 139 


regarded as utterly misleading and false. 
So each man believed the religion of his 
own people, or of his own tradition, to be 
the true religion, and all other religions to 
be utterly vain and foolish, and even 
wicked, and to do their devotees no good 
at all but, on the contrary, a great deal of 
harm. During the nineteenth century, 
however, this view, which had long been 
questioned by the far-seeing few, came at 
last to be quite generally discredited. It is 
the true soul of the nineteenth century 
which speaks in Matthew Arnold when he 
cries : 

“Children of Men! the unseen Power, 

whose eye 
For ever doth accompany mankind, 


Hath looked on no religion scornfully 
That men did ever find. 


Which has not taught weak wills how 
much they can ? 

Which has not fall’n on the dry heart 
like rain ? 


140 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


Which has not cried to sunk self- 
weary man : 
Thou must be born again ?””’ 


What we now understand is that the 
various religious systems of the world, 
far from representing so many utterly 
various and conflicting guesses, all stand 
at bottom for the same fundamental view 
as to the meaning of life. Several lines of 
research and of reflection have united in 
leading us to this important insight. In 
the first place it is becoming clearer every 
day that the religions of the uncivilised 
races in every quarter of the globe, and at 
every period of which we have any record, 
bear a quite remarkable resemblance to 
one another. Indeed we are now in a 
position to say that the primitive religions 
are, at bottom, but one religion. “‘ Religion 
in the lower culture,’ says Professor Estlin 
Carpenter, ‘‘takes many forms but, speaking 
broadly, they rest upon a common interpre- 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS I4I 


tation of the World.’ 1 Since it is out of 
this primitive root that all our so-called 
religions have grown, it thus becomes 
difficult to think that these are properly to 
be regarded as mutually exclusive systems. 
And, as a matter of fact, the closer and more 
sympathetic study and the better-equipped 
historical investigation that have recently 
been devoted to the more important of the | 
advanced religious systems of the world, 
have been leading us in no small part to 
an identical conclusion. The old lines that 
used to divide the different religions so 
sharply from one another have in almost 
every case become blurred and uncertain. 
It is now impossible to mention any religion 
that is regarded by the historians as a 
unit clearly separable from the rest of 
world-religion. Every known religion is a 
complex phenomenon, a_ synthesis of 
previous historical entities, and the elements 


1 Comparative Religion, p. 101. 


142 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


that go to make it up have, many of them, 
entered also into those partially different 
combinations which we call the other 
religions. The plain truth is, therefore, 
that in any strict sense of the term, the 
world never has seen a new religion. This 
is well put by Father Tyrrell in his 
Christiamty at the Cross-Roads, a book that 
contains not a little sound instruction 
among much that is extreme and lacking 
in balance. ‘‘ There have been and may 
yet be new religious institutions,” he 
says, ‘“‘but there has not been and never can 
be a new religion, any more than a new 
language. Each is a bifurcation of some 
branch that is itself a bifurcation ; and all 
can trace their origin to a common stem 
that has grown out of a root-idea—the 
idea of religion.’ 1 Have we not all of 
us at one time or another had the experience 
of discovering behind the apparently com- 


1 Christianity at the Cross-Roads, p. 252. 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 143 


plete mutual exclusiveness of two different 
religious institutions a marvellously identical 
faith ? As you will soon see when I come 
to speak of them, I have no desire whatever 
to minimise the differences between the 
various religious systems, but at present 
I shall go so far as to say this: that the 
element of identity in world-religion is, on 
the whole, at least as important as are the 
elements of diversity. 

Of Christianity the same thing is here 
true as is true of all other systems. New 
Testament scholars are, I think, agreed 
that Jesus never thought of Himself as 
founding anything that could be called 
a new religion ; just as Indian scholars tell 
us that Buddha never intended to found a 
new religion, but only a new monastic 
order. Jesus was, from first to last, loyal 
to all the fundamental religious traditions 
of His people, and there is no sign of His 
ever having intended to brush these aside 


144 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


and put something else in their place. 
The differences between the piety of the 
Old Testament and that of the New— 
between the Hebrew and the Christian 
faiths—are in many respects, as I shall 
soon be insisting, of a very deep-going 
kind, but they are not such as really to 
justify our thinking of the two faiths, 
quite bluntly, as different religions. In 
reality there are no such things as different 
religions—any more than there are different 
moralities. There are different varieties 
of religion and different stages in the 
progress of religion, and there are differing 
religious traditions, and there are all sorts 
and conditions of religious institutions ; 
but in a grand and ultimate sense there 
is only one religion—the religion which 
finds its first crude and vague expression 
on the lips of the savage; the religion 
which gradually, though blunderingly and 
stumblingly, rises to certain lower summits 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 145 


of its noble ascent in Veda and Zend- 
Avesta, in Greek tragedian and Hebrew 
law-giver and prophet ; the religion which 
at last finds its full and only complete 
consummation in the soul of Jesus Christ. 
As Dean Inge has said, ‘‘ The Gospel of 
Christ is not @ religion, but religion itself, 
in its universal and deepest significance.” ! 

Now it seems to me that this conclusion 
is one that is of very real practical help to 
us in our religious thinking. It is a help 
to be able to feel that in deciding for 
Christ and Christianity we are not merely, 
and perhaps for largely accidental and 
traditional reasons, giving our adherence 
to one among a thousand alternative 
panaceas that have been suggested for our 
human ills, Christianity, I am glad to 
think, is not a special brand of religion, as 
it were; it is just religion itself, religion 
at its best and at its widest, faith in God 


1 Outspoken Essays, First Series, p. 229. 


146 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


at its surest and clearest. It is true that 
the attempt has often been made within 
the Christian Church to give to Christianity 
an esoteric and exclusivist turn—to convert 
it into a secret cult or a new and unique 
philosophy, to identify it with a specific 
mystical experience or one (albeit the best) 
of many possible avenues to God. But 
the best solvent for all such misunder- 
standings of it is a re-reading of the Gospel 
story. There were many secret cults and 
sects and many rival mystery-religions 
competing for men’s devotion in the age 
when Christianity was born. Galilee must 
have listened, on the one hand, to many 
a strange prophet retailing some patent 
recipe for the soul’s salvation and, on the 
other hand, to many a narrow-minded and 
traditional-bound ecclesiastic demanding 
an exclusive allegiance to the religious — 
institutions of his own land. But in 
listening to Jesus men were listening to 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 147 


something different, to something strangely 
new; they were listening to one who 
emphasised neither traditional institutions 
on the one hand nor any dermer crt in 
religion on the other, but only and always 
the heart’s native faith. Jesus had eyes 
to find this faith in the queerest places and 
in the queerest people—in people whom 
the pious clerics of the day would not passon 
the street without shutting their eyes, lest 
the sight should pollute their holiness ; and 
yet He found it lacking in the very quarters 
where churchly tradition might seem to 
be strongest. Yes, the faith which Jesus 
required of men was neither credal 
adherence nor mystic ecstasy so much as 
the faith that is in some sort native to 
every pure and gentle heart—the faith in 
man, the faith in life, the faith in the power 
of love, the faith in the Unseen Love of 
God. If you only had more faith! If you 
only had more love !—is not that the central 


148 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


burden of the message of Christ? For 
myself, and quite apart from what this 
and that expert critic may say, I can 
never read the Synoptic Gospels through 
without feeling how pronounced, how 
refreshingly pronounced, is this vein of 
broad-mindedness, of lay good sense, of 
anti-clericalism, of anti-exclusivism and 
anti-particularism in the temper and 
teaching of our Lord. There is something 
about all He says—about the way of life 
He proposes and about the thought of 
God He inculcates—that makes us feel 
at once that it can be foreign to no human 
heart. The greatest thing about Christianity 
is not really its novelty so much as its 
universality, not its uniqueness so much as 
its inclusiveness. Its Founder was indeed 
at no small pains to make it clear that His 
teaching was for the most part in line with 
the best teaching of the past of His people. 
Christianity does not exclude the deep and 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 149 


real messages of the other religions, but 
much rather includes them; and this is a 
truth which was first effectively redis- 
covered, not in any high-and-dry academic 
quarter, but (as long ago by St. Paul at 
Athens) in the actual experience of the 
mission-field. JI am glad that Christianity 
does not end in “‘—ism.’”’ It is not an 
“—ism.’’ It is neither a special theory 
nor a special brand of piety so much as it 
is the religion of all who strive to love God 
with all their heart and soul and strength 
and mind, and their neighbours as them- 


selves. 


II 


And now that that has been said, let us 
look at the other side of the matter, at the 
very plain and obvious element of diversity 
that there is in world-religion. The diversity 
is, of course, greatest when we are com- 


150 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


paring the religion of some very primitive 
people with that of some civilised race. 
If, for instance, we place the religion of 
Jesus and St. Paul side by side with that 
of the Central Australian aborigines or of 
an American Indian tribe, it will require 
not only much sympathetic psychological 
insight but also a certain considerable 
equipment of anthropological and historical 
knowledge in order to see any resemblance 
between the two atall. Indeed, in bringing 
together two such extremes as these are, 
it is not really for resemblance that we 
should look—any more than we should 
expect to find a resemblance between the 
acorn and the oak—but rather for some 
evolutionary relationship. Clearly the most 
striking diversities between the religious 
ideas and practices of different races are 
just as in the parallel case of morality, 
due to the fact of progress. But not all 
diversities can be so understood, for there 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS I51 


is also notable diversity in the religions of 
races which stand upon what is roughly 
the same cultural level, as, for example, the 
religion of the ancient Hebrews and that 
of the ancient Greeks or the higher forms 
of Indian religion. Can we, then, find 
something like a general law which will 
cover both kinds of diversity? I think 
we can. I think we may say that the 
development and the variety of world- 
religion are to be mainly explained by the 
fact that men’s religious ideas keep pace 
with their twdeas of moral value. From a 
very early stage in religion’s growth the 
all-determinative religious idea is the idea 
of God, and men’s ideas of God are always 
faithful mirrors of the things they value 
most. As Goethe said long ago, 


“Im innern ist ein Universum auch, 
Daher der Volker I6blicher Gebrauch, 
Dass jeglicher das Beste, was er kennt, 
Er Gott, ja seinen Gott benennt, 


152 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


Ihm Himmel und Erden iibergiebt, 
Ihn fiirchtet und woméglich liebt.” 


‘Within us, as well as without us, there 
is a Universe ; and thence arises the praise- 
worthy custom of all peoples that each 
should call the best he knows by the name 
of God, his God; and give over heaven 
and earth to Him; and fear Him and, 
when possible, love Him.” It is this 
same truth which Hoffding puts in the 
exact language of science, when he says 
that “‘ every religious standpotnt gathers up 
into its conception of God the highest known 
values.’’ 1 There is only one qualification 
which I think the facts of religious history 
compel us to make to this statement, and 
that is that there often seems to be a 
considerable interval of time between the 
discovery of a new value in the ethical and 
social sphere and its application to religion, 
The appearance of a discrepancy between 


2 Philosophy of Religion, English translation, p. 61. 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 133 


the standards operative in the best mind 
of the people as a whole and the standards 
reflected in their thought of God is a not 
unfamiliar historical phenomenon ; and so, 
instead of saying that men’s ideas of God 
“keep pace’ with their developing ethical 
insights, we should perhaps say, “‘ follow 
a pace or two behind.’ The main point 
to be grasped, however, is simply that it 
is in the light of men’s practical values 
and ideals that the criticism of the idea 
of God, in which religious advance so 
largely consists, is always carried on; and 
that a new and forward step in religion 
always means the discovery of a new value 
in the sphere of social conduct and sts 
(perhaps somewhat tardy) application to 
religion and the thought of God, 


Ill 
In the light of these preliminary con- 


154 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


siderations we may now raise the question, 
What is it in Christianity that is really 
distinctive and that gives us a right to 
believe that it alone can fully satisfy our 
human need? What has it to add to the 
religious life of mankind as a whole? 
Perhaps you will feel like answering that 
a good part of what it does is not to add 
but to subtract something. And indeed it 
is true that no small part of the message 
of Jesus is a message of deliverance from 
the too elaborate paraphernalia of the old 
religions. It has been well said that part 
of the trouble with the religion of Jesus’ 
Jewish contemporaries is not that you will 
not find in their writings teaching that is 
very like the teaching of Jesus, but that 
you will find a great deal else too. Read 
through the books of the ‘‘Mosaic”’ Law, 
read some of the Rabbinic literature dating 
from about the time of Christianity’s 
birth, read also what is left of the sacred 





WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 155 


oracular and liturgical books of the 
Romans; and then read the Sermon on 
the Mount and Jesus’ answers to the 
question ‘“‘ What must I do to be saved ? ”’ 
and Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians ; 
and you cannot, I think, but be struck by 
the simplicity and directness of the Christian 
religion, as it was first preached. ‘‘ My 
yoke, said Jesus, “is easy, and my 
burden is light.”” Yet this simplicity which 
attaches to the teaching of Jesus is no mere 
negative quality, but on the contrary 
springs from a positive insight and is 
closely connected with that greatly 
increased znwardness which historians have 
so often remarked to be a leading character- 
istic both of the Christian ethic and of the 
Christian faith. The demands of Jesus are 
simple because they are inward. “ The 
tendency to develop and make prominent 
a scheme of external duties,’ we read in 
Sidgwick’s History of Ethics, “ has always 


156 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


been balanced and counteracted in 
Christianity by the ineffaceable remem- 
brance of .the founder’s opposition to 
Jewish legalism. . . . It has never been 
forgotten that ‘inwardness,’ rightness of 
heart or spirit, is the special and pre-eminent 
characteristic of Christian goodness.”’ 5 We 
may say, then, with assurance, that 
Christianity stands out from world-religion 
as a whole in respect both of its greater 
simplicity and its greater inwardness, The 
religion of Jesus is the religion of the heart 
in its simplest and most straightforward 
expression. 

But can we go further? Can we say 
that Christianity stands for some definitely 
new light upon life and upon God—some 
light which men can get nowhere else? 
I think we can, and I shall do my best to 
say what I believe the new light to be. 

Our general reflections upon the nature 


® History of Ethics, pp. 113-114. 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 157 


of religious progress will perhaps have led 
us to expect the emergence in Christianity 
of some new ethical insight together with 
its new application to the thought of God 
and the Unseen World. And that is 
exactly what we do seem to find. The 
new ethical insight we can perhaps best 
express in a famous saying of St. Paul’s: 


MelEwv dé tovTwv  ayarn. 
“The greatest thing of all is love.’ 


If we place ourselves before the phenomenon 
of historic Christianity as a whole and, 
regarding it broadly, ask ourselves where 
the characteristic genius of it is to be 
taken to lie, we shall inevitably be led 
back to that new spirit which was in the 
early Christian community and to express 
which the early believers had to bring into 
currency what was all but a new word; 
the word agapé, which we can only translate 
as Christian love. I think even the 


158 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


outsider knows that the Christian way of 
life, whenever it has been true to itself, 
has been the way of love. Historical 
critics have, indeed, often enough puzzled 
their heads about the essence of Christianity 
and have not infrequently lured their 
readers into a like uncertainty ; and yet I 
believe that in his heart the ordinary man 
knows well enough what is meant by a 
Christian life. It is true that (as we saw 
in the first of these chapters) the knowledge 
is far from being always ready to his use, 
and that, if you ask him point-blank, he 
will as like as not give you a wrong answer 
or no answer at all; but if you take the 
better way of studying his common usage 
of the word “Christian’’ in ordinary 
conversation, you may find that he is 
really wiser in this matter than many a 
learned writer. The phrases ‘‘ You’re a 
Christian ’’ or “ That’s Christian of him ”’ 


were good army slang during the war 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 159 


years in France, and, however far they 
fell short of their ideal meaning, they were 
nevertheless usually employed in such a 
way as to make it clear that the world as 
a whole has not wholly failed to grasp the 
meaning of the Christian message. 

But how did the new spirit arise? 
Whence came this agape? Where did 
Paul learn that “the greatest thing of all 
is love’’? There is, of course, but one 
answer. The new insight goes back, in 
the most direct way possible, to what 
the mind which was in Christ 


¢¢ 


Paul calls 
Jesus.” What makes Jesus stand out from 
the page of history is just this; that more 
than anybody before Him and also, it is 
to be feared, more than anybody since 
His time, He believed in love. And every 
time that either Paul or John pronounces 
the word agapé, the remembrance of the 
life and death of Jesus is vividly in their 
minds. 


160 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


Let us, then, see what it is that Jesus | 
has to say to us about love; and let us, 
following the New Testament example, © 


remember that He says it with His deeds 


and with His life’s blood as well as with — 
His lips. No reader of the Gospels can 
long remain in doubt that Jesus has some- — 
thing quite special and particular to teach : 


us about the management of our relations 
with one another. It should be clear also 
that what He does is not to provide us 


with a detailed moral code or even to throw © 
out a large number of valuable hints so — 
much as to whisper a single and simple — 
secret in our ears. And this is what He 


whispers: Have you tried the way of love ? 


Love, He believed, was the solvent of all 
our difficulties, all our problems of conduct, — 
all that mars our intercourse with one © 
another. Love, He believed, was the way | 


to tackle every situation, to win every kind 





| 
| 
; 
| 
| 
] 


ofman. Weall, of course, love somebody ; — 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 161 


we all love our kinsfolk; we all love 
people who love us and are kind to us; 
we all love people who are good and 
charming. Even the heathen, as Jesus 
was so fond of pointing out, do that. 
But what we are now asked to do is 
to love our enemies, to love those 
who hate us, to love the stranger at our 
gates, to love the poor, to love the sick, to 
love prisoners, to love the down-trodden 
and all who are as lost sheep in our midst, 
to love our prodigal sons, to love the 
outcasts, to love the sinners, Especially 
Jesus seems to have been anxious to suggest 
the way of love as an alternative for 
anything like an appeal to justice. The 
saying “ Judge not”’ carries us very deep 
into His philosophy of life. ‘‘ The motive 
of justice,’ says Professor E. F. Scott in 
his book on The Ethical Teaching of Jesus, 
“undoubtedly tends to fall into the back- 


ground,’ the law of love taking its place ; 
M 


162 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


and, as the same writer adds, ‘“‘ There can 
be no question that in the final issue the 
position of Jesus is unanswerable. 
Indiscriminate kindness may be blamed 
for many evils, but infinitely more harm 
has been wrought by man’s blundering 


efforts to do justice.””! The Mosaic law 


had set up an equitable standard of 
compensatory justice in order to curb the 
natural instinct for unlimited vengeance 
which had found expression in the bitter 
vendettas of the Semitic tribesmen. “ No 
more than an eye for an eye, no more than 
a tooth for a tooth,’ it had decreed, 
thereby inaugurating a great advance in 
moral standards. Yet at no point does 





ng a ee a eee re 


Se ee a eee Se 


Jesus set Himself in more outspoken 


opposition to the old order than just here. 
“Ye have heard that it hath been said, 
An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: 


but I say unto you that ye resist not evil, 


1 The Ethical Teaching of Jesus (American Edition), 
pp. 85-86. 


eA, Se eo ie = Ee 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 163 


but whosoever shall smite thee on thy 
right cheek, turn to him the other also 

Ye have heard that it hath been 
said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and 
hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, 


399 


Love your enemies If only we 
knew the joy which love brings, if only 
we knew the power which is in it to melt 
the hardest heart and to win the coldest 
heart, then, says Jesus, we would put 
aside all that loveless, frigid, hate-begetting 
machinery of distributive and retributive 
justice—recrimination, revenge, compensa- 
tion, standing upon one’s rights, satisfaction 
for outraged dignity, the appeal to the 
law-courts, and all their sorry like. Put 
your trust in love, He says to us; trust it 
utterly ; trust it to the very end; put all 
your weight on it ; for it will not fail you— 
love never fails. That this was the plain 
teaching of Jesus has been recognised even 
by those critics who have felt themselves 


164. THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


unable to accept it. Professor Kirsopp 
Lake, for instance, says : 


ce 


. . Experience (which has, after 
all, some merit) seems to prove that 
the policy of not resisting evil leads 
to its triumph rather than its defeat. 
But this fact gives no justification for 
explaining away or watering down the 
plain and intelligible teaching of Jesus. 
It was his teaching.” ! 


I do not wish to comment on Professor 
Lake’s disagreement with Jesus, but there 
will be many of us who cannot forbear a 
wry smile at being told that in this respect 
“the War has brought out the human 
limitations of the ethics of Jesus by the 
intellectual horizon of His own time.” # 
The War! And yet did not Mr. Bernard Shaw 
tell us that the only man who came out of 


1 Landmarks in the History of Early Christiamty 
(American Edition), pp. 25-26. 


2 sbid. 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 165 


that same War with any intellectual credit 
was Jesus Christ ? 


But what is this love which Christianity 
makes to be the secret of right living and 
would have us display towards all those 
with whom we have to do? Well, there 
is nothing about it that really needs 
explaining, for it is a very familiar part of 
the instinctive nature of us all. It is 
rooted in what modern psychologists call the 
parental sentiment—the sentiment which 
is at the basis of family life, the sentiment 
which we exercise primarily towards our 
children but also, with only slight modifi- 
cation, towards all our near relatives and 
towards the friend of our bosom. Now it 
was the conviction of Jesus, and it is a 
great part of the distinctive message of 
Christianity, that the highest of our human 
values are the values found and developed 
in the life of the family, and that if only, 
in our dealings with all those with whom 


166 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


we have to do, we displayed one half of the 
patience and the tenderness and the 
sympathy and the understanding and the 
forgiveness which we display to our brothers 
and our sons, the world would be a far 
better and happier place. Every reader 
of the Gospels must realise how dear to the 
heart of Jesus family life was. It was in 
certain deeds He had seen done and certain 
words He had seen spoken within the 
family circle that the life of those little 
Eastern towns in which His days were spent 
seemed to strike its highest value—in a 
mother’s tenderness and selfless devotion 
to the child of her womb, in the large- 
hearted generosity of brother towards 
brother, in a much-tried father’s free for- 
giveness.of his erring son. Thus was His 
great secret suggested to Him. If only we 
could extend these family values! If only 
we could all live as brothers! If only we 
could deal with our enemies as we deal 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 167 


with our friends! If only we could feel 
towards the lost sheep of our human 
society as a Galilean shepherd feels towards 
his sheep when they go astray, or, better 
still, as the best kind of Galilean father feels 
when his profligate and wandering son 
returns to him at last! 

But in what sense, and to what extent, 
can this teaching be said to have been new ? 
Of recent’ years there has been much 
discussion of this question, and some of it 
has not been very profitable. It must of 
course be granted at once that there is 
nothing either in the temper or in the 
teaching of Jesus that is a sheer novelty, 
an utterly new beginning unrelated to all 
that goes before. You will not find that 
anywhere in history or anywhere in human 
experience. Ex nilulo ml. It seems 
certain that not a few of the doubts that 
have recently been cast upon the originality 
of what our Lord has to say to us are due 


168 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


to the fact that the critics who give 
expression to them are working with a 
largely false and chimerical idea of what it 
is that constitutes true historical originality. 
I feel also that it is doing something less 
than justice to the facts to find the origin- 
ality and greatness of Jesus to lie merely 
in a number of scattered convictions. In 
their recent scholarly work on The Begin- 
nings of Christianity, Professors Foakes- 
Jackson and Lake write: 


“In what way did the teaching of 
Jesus differ from that of his contem- 
poraries? . . . The differences which 
are important concern three subjects 
of vital and controversial interest— 
resistance to the oppressors of Israel, 
the fate of the People of the Land, and 
the right observance of the Law.” ! 


From one point of view, however, I cannot 
help finding something almost naive in 


1 The Beginnings of Christiantty, Vol. I, pp. 288-289. 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 169 


such a catalogue, for there seems to be in 
it no proper realisation of the fact that 
behind all three items of it (and surely also 
behind not a few other teachings that fell 
only less strangely on the ears of the Scribes 
and Pharisees) there is a single principle, 
a single spirit, a single new insight. What 
was really new about Jesus’ outlook on life 
was not three things, but only one; namely, 
that in it, as never before in human history, 
the law of loving-kindness was realised in 
its full meaning and made to cover every 
relationship of life. 

In the mind of Jesus Himself, indeed, 
there seems to have been perfect clarity 
on this whole issue. Jesus knew that love 
was not a new thing in the world but was, 
on the contrary, a thing rooted very 
deeply in the instinctive natures of us all. 
He knew that the Old Testament was full 
of injunctions to love, and He took special 
pleasure in being able to quote from the Old 


170 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


Testament in support of all but His most 
characteristic teachings about love. It was 
in Leviticus that He found that saying 
which He has made so intimately His own, 
“Thou shalt love they neighbour as thy- 
self.”” And yet He knew well that in His 
teaching as a whole there was contained a 
new wine which would in the end burst the 
old bottles of the Jewish code. He knew 
that nobody had ever taken the law of love 
so much in earnest, or had realised the full 
extent of its tremendous implications, or 
had made it the one law of life, as He was 
now doing. And so, though none ever 
made less of a fetich of originality, yet at 
the crucial point He did not hesitate to 
proclaim the real uniqueness of His out- 
look: ‘“ Ye have heard that it hath been 
said)... But 1 say unto you eee 
it is remarkable that here He quarrels even 
with the saying from Leviticus, finding its 
word neighbour too narrow to do justice to 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 171 


the whole meaning of love). The lapse of 
time has shown Him to have been right in 
both respects. The agapé of the early 
Christianity community, though there is 
nothing in the principle of it that is foreign 
to the best life of any people, has neverthe- 
less turned out to be, in the pure perfection 
to which it was elevated by Our Lord, as 
genuinely new and re-creative a value as 
any with which ethical history anywhere 
acquaints us. What is there that on the 
one hand has proved to be more in line 
with the highest conscience of mankind as 
a whole, or that on the other has worked 
more revolutions in men’s dealings with 
one another and has in it more power to 
work revolutions yet to be, than just 
Christian charity and love ? 

And now let us turn to the Christian 
teaching about God. 


172 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 
IV 


The Christian thought of God appears in 
the New Testament as the natural and 
necessary accompaniment of the Christian 
teaching about human life, the new insight 
into ideal humanity carrying with it an 
equally new understanding of the nature 
of Deity. The logic of faith leads directly 
and inevitably from the discovery that, 


Mei~wv 8 rodrwv % dydrn, 


“The greatest of these is love,” 


to the further realisation that, 


‘O Oeds dydrn eoriv, 


‘““ God is love.”’ 


And the two sentences together may well 
be taken to express in brief the whole 
essence of Christianity. 

“God is love.’”’ I do not think I need 
take time to prove to you that that is the one 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 173 


supreme piece of good news which every 
New Testament writer is, in his different 
manner, concerned to publish to the world. 
Through all the Johannine literature the 
words ring like a refrain. Paul’s Gospel 
may seem at first more difficult to 
summarise, yet what is the gist and marrow 
of it but just this: that, sinners though we 
be, God nevertheless loves us and is willing, 
of His free grace, and quite irrespective of 
any merit on our part, to receive us into 
His fellowship ? Of Christian history as a 
whole the same thing is true. What is it 
that lies behind, and gives unity to, all the 
confusing varieties of creed and dogma 
and theological system, if not the joyful 
Christian persuasion that the heart of the 
Eternal has been manifested in Jesus 
Christ as a heart of love ? 

The question has, however, been raised 
whether this Christian news about God can, 
like the new ethical insight on which it 


174. THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


ultimately rests, be traced back to the — 
mind of Jesus Himself; and, as you know, 
a number of very distinguished scholars 
have recently felt themselves obliged to 
answer this question in the negative. Their 
view is that, in His attitude to God, Jesus — 
Himself was not a Christian but a Jew, 
and that He Himself never realised, as did 
the first generation of His followers, the 
profound theological implications of the 
new spirit which He manifested in His life 
and in His death. For instance, Dr. 
McGiffert writes : 


“ Jesus’ idea of God was wholly 
Jewish. At no point, so far as we can © 
judge from the Synoptic Gospels, did 
he go beyond His people’s thought of 
God... ... So far as the God of#the 
Christians is different from the God of 
the Jews, it is due not to Jesus’ teaching 
about God, but to the teaching of Paul 
and those who came after, or still more 
to the personality of Jesus and the 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 175 


interpretation His followers put upon 
recat 


If this were true, it would mean that in the 
origin of Christianity we are confronted 
with a case of what we have already 
referred to as a fairly familiar historical 
phenomenon, namely, the temporary lagging 
of religious behind ethical insight. 

I would venture to suggest to you, 
however, that this is exactly what we do 
not find. Indeed I should say that there 
are few things about the Synoptic Gospels 
which are more impressive than the perfect 
harmony that there is in them between 
the attitude to life which they recommend 
and the thought of God which they incul- 
cate. The spirit which Jesus Himself mani- 
fested in His dealings with men and His 
teaching about the manner in which God 
deals with them, so far from conflicting 


1 The God of the Early Christians (American Edition), 
Dear. 


176 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


with one another, seem to melt into a single 
whole, and to be covered by the same 
phrases and even illustrated by the same 
parables. If, for instance, we take the three 
features of Jesus’ outlook on life singled 
out by Professors Foakes-Jackson and Lake 
as marking the clearest divergences from 
the current ethical standards, I venture to 
say that every one of them is in the Synoptic 
Gospels related to the thought of God. 
The first, you will remember, was the 
counsel not to confine our love to those 
who love us, but to love also those who are 
hostile to us; but Jesus does not give us 
that counsel without adding that by so 
doing we shall be but imitating our Heavenly 
Father who also “ is kind unto the unthank- 
ful and the evil.”” And what is that but 
the universal Christian message that God 
rewards us, not according to our deserts, 
returning evil for evil upon us, but accord- 
ing to the inexhaustible riches of His own 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 177 


free grace and love ? The second point was 
the attitude of Jesus to publicans and 
sinners. The newness of it is well brought 
out by the distinguished Jewish scholar, 
Dr. Montefiore, who says : 


“The summons not to wait till they 
meet you on your sheltered and orderly 
path, but to go forth and seek out and 
redeem the sinner and the fallen, the 
passion to heal and bring back to God 
the wretched and the outcast—all this 
I do not find in Rabbinism ; that form 
of love seems lacking.” } 

“Surely this is a new note, some- 
thing which we have not yet heard in 
the Old Testament or of z#s heroes, some- 
thing which we do not hear in the 
Walmud or of ats heroes...) The 
virtues of repentance are gloriously 
praised in the Kabbinical literature, 
but this direct search for, and appeal 
to, the sinner are new and moving notes 
of high import and significance.” # 


“The Spirit of Judaism’ in The Beginnings of 
Christianity (ed. Jackson and Lake), Vol. I, p. 79. 
? Quoted from Montefiore’s Synoptic Gospels by Moffatt, 
Theology of the Gospels, p. 125. 
N 


178’ THE \ROOTS* OF (RELIGION 


Nothing, however, could be clearer than 


that it is in the name of God that Jesus thus © 


seeks out the sinners and welcomes them 
back to a new life. It is God’s mercy He 
is bringing to them, not His own. It is 
true that He tells the story of the Lost 
Sheep to-justify His own attitude in 
receiving sinners and eating with them, 
but when He has finished telling it, it is 
only of Heaven’s mercy that He speaks. 


“TI say unto you that likewise there 
shall be joy in heaven over one sinner 
that repenteth more than over ninety 
and nine just persons which need no 
repentance.”’ 


And, once more, could there be a better 
summary than that of the characteristic 
Pauline and Christian Gospel? And as 
for the third point, Jesus’ new attitude to 
the Law, it seems equally clear to me that 
it definitely carried with it a correspondingly 





i a ea ee re ea ea a ee ne ee ee eS 





sa — 
as 
¥ Pn ang. 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 179 


new conception of the mind and will of the 
Law-giver. So He quoted: “I will have 
mercy, and not sacrifice.” 

It would appear to be true, then, not only 
that what Jesus believes about God is the 
perfect counterpart and necessary corollary 
of what He believes about human life, but 
also that He Himself presented it as such. 
Do we not indeed find Him explicitly 
arguing that we must think of God in 
terms of what we have found to be best in 
human life? God, He would say to us, 
is infinitely better than our human best, 
and yet our human best is the most reliable 
key we possess to His nature and the manner 
of His dealings with men. So the appeals 
which Jesus makes to our faith regularly 
take the form of a “‘ How muchmore . .!” 
—an argument a forivor1, as the logicians 
call it. 


“What man is there of you, whom 
if his son ask bread, will he give him a 


180 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


stone? Or if he ask a fish will he give 
him a serpent? If ye then, evil as ye 
are, know how to give good gifts unto 
your children, how much more will 
your Father which is in Heaven give 
good things to them that ask him?” 1 


‘“ After this manner therefore pray — 
ye, Our Father which art in Heaven | 


. forgive us our debts, as [even] 
we ourselves have forgiven our 
debtors.” ? 


Nothing, indeed, could be plainer than that 
in the beauty and nobility of the best 
family life Jesus finds not only the secret 
of good conduct but also the secret of what 
God is like. It is because He believes that 
all men are destined to be brothers that He 
believes God to be pre-eminently a Father. 
And just as the former belief is the heart 
and soul of the Christian ethic, so the latter 
belief is the heart and soul of the Christian 


1 Matthew, vii, 9-II. 


2 Matthew, vi, 9,12. The rendering of the last clause is 
Dr. Moffatt’s. 


: 





WHAT CHRISTIANITY JIS 181 


religion. Here, then, is the gist of 
Christianity for you in a single sentence— 
and it is the Christianity of Jesus no less 
than that of Paul or Athanasius or Luther : 
At the centre of the Universe there 1s That 
which 1s more like a father’s loving heart 
than like anything else we know. 

But what is there about this belief that 
is new? The answer, once more, has two_ 
sides to it. On the one hand we must 
realise that every constituent element in 
the Christian Gospel had to some extent 
been foreshadowed in earlier religious 
history. The love and the fatherhood of God 
had been taught before and had indeed 
been in some sort implicit in human religion 
from its earliest beginnings. In the Old 
Testament especially you will find them 
again and again insisted on in the noblest 
and most moving terms. On the other 
hand it is only in the New Testament that 
they seem to be given a really primary, 


182 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


and, as it were, over-arching significance. 
In the New Testament love is at last — 
elevated to the supreme and all-determining 
place in the character of God; and it is so 
elevated just because its full meaning and ~ 
beauty and power are now at last under- j 
stood. And I am myself sufficiently 
convinced that the change goes back to the 
mind of our Lord Himself. It seems to 
me that just as Jesus recommended men 
to follow the way of love rather than the 
way of mere justice in their dealings with 
one another, so there is evidence that love 
takes the place of justice in His mind as 
the supremest attribute of God. Instead 
of mercy being subordinated in the Divine 
character to justice (as it is in a judge), 
justice now seems at last to be subordinated 
to mercy and love (as it is in a father). 
After all, it is a very vital question that is 
here suggested to our minds—whether the 
spiritual Universe is a Law-court or a 





WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 183 


Father’s House ; whether it be meticulous, 
compensatory Justice which dwells at its 
centre or limitless Generosity and large- 
hearted Sympathy. And it seems to me 
that the issue is definitely raised in not a 
few Gospel passages, and that in these 
passages it is the teaching of Jesus that 
God is not to be thought of at all as being 
just ; which does not, of course, mean that 
He is unjust, but rather that He is more 
than just, that His attitude to sinful men 
transcends justice as much as does a good 
father’s attitude to his children. 


“Love your enemies, bless them 
that curse you . . . that ye may be 
children of your Father which is in 
heaven ; for he maketh his sun to rise 
on the evil and on the good, and 
sendeth rain on the just and on the 
unjust.” 

“Love your enemies, and do good, 
and lend, hoping for nothing again 

and ye shall be children of the 


184 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


Most High; for he is kind unto the > 
unthankful and the evil. Be ye there- — 
fore merciful, as your Father is also — 
merciful.”’ 

“ Friend, I do thee no wrong ; didst — 
not thou agree with me for a penny ? 
Take that thine is, and go thy way; I 
will give unto this last even as unto 
thee. Is it not lawful for me to do 
what I will with mine own? Dost 
thou look with envy, because I am 
generous ?”’ } 

“T say unto you that likewise joy 
shall be in heaven over one sinner that 
repenteth, more than over ninety and 
nine just persons, which need no 
repentance.”’ 





And in that loveliest of Gospel pages, the — 
parable of the Prodigal Son, it is this 
same lesson which seems to be expressly 
taught. The elder son in the parable 
stands for fair-minded, distributive justice ; 
the father stands for limitless, uncalculating 


1 The last sentence is from Dr. Moffatt’s translation. 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 185 


love and generosity ; and so we have the | 
old teaching and the new set side by side 
for our better understanding of the differ- 
ence between them. 


“Lo, these many years do I serve 
thee, neither transgressed I at any 
time thy commandment: and yet 
thou never gavest me a kid, that I 
might make merry with my friends: 
But as soon as this thy son was come, 
which hath devoured thy living with 
harlots, thou hast killed for him the 
fatted calf. 

And he said unto him, Son, thou art 
ever with me, and all that I have is 
thine. It was meet that we should 
make merry and be glad: for this thy 
brother was dead, and is alive again ; 
and was lost, and is found.”’ 


I feel myself that it is just here that we 
come upon the most distinctive part of the 
Christian message. For long ages men had 
believed, and all the great religions of the 


186 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


world have always taught, that (in 
Carlyle’s phrase) “‘ the great Soul of the 
World is just,’ and that, if we ourselves 

act righteously, we shall be fairly and even 

kindly dealt with by the Most High. But 

the Christian Gospel gives us a more joyful 
assurance still, an assurance more suited 

to the needs of sinful men such as we all 

are. It assures us that at the heart of 

things there is better even than fair play, 

and nothing less than active out-going 

Love. It assures that God is even more 

than a fair-minded Judge: Heisa tender- 
hearted Shepherd, a loving and forgiving 

Father. 

In our own time there has been much 
talk of a discrepancy between the teaching 
of Jesus and the teaching of Paul. Well, 
the differences may go deep, but they do 
not go to the bottom. The Gospel of Jesus 
and the Gospel of Paul I believe to be, at 
the heart of them, identically the same. 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 187 


For the good news for which Christianity 
stood in the mind of Paul, and which led 
him to embrace it in preference to Judaism, 
was nothing else than this; that God is 
not a Judge with a pair of scales in His 
hands Who rewards men according to their 
deserts, but a fond and loving Father Who, 
out of His loving-kindness made manifest 
in Jesus Christ, is ever ready to extend His 
grace to those who, however undeserving, 
are willing to receive it with a humble heart. 
As he says himself : 


“No distinctions are drawn. All 
have sinned, all have come short of 
the glory of God, but they are justified 
for nothing by His grace.” ! 


V 


Now it is of course true that there is not 
a little in the Synoptic Gospels about the 


1 Romans, iii, 22-24. Moffatt’s translation. 


188 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


justice of God, about His punishment of 

sin, about His stern demeanour to sinners 
and even about His wrath. And what I 
have been insisting upon, as being the core 
of the Christian message, is not that God 
is not Justice and does not punish sinners 
and is not angry towards them, but rather 
that His justice and His punishment and 
His anger are all made the servants of His 
love. That is to say, they are the justice 
and punishment and anger of a father, not 
of a judge: as it is argued in the E#zsile to 
the Hebrews, ‘““ For whom the Lord loveth 
he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son 
whom he receiveth. Ii ye) %endure 
chastening, God dealeth with you as with 
sons; for what son is he whom the father 
chasteneth not?”’’ A number of recent 
writers, however, have gone further and 
taken another view; and I shall now say 
something about their view, if only by way 
of illustration of the general argument of 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 189 


Boese lectures. The late C. W. Emmet 
and the late Lily Dougall in their book 
The Lord of Thought, and Miss Dougall in 
her posthumously-published little volume 
God's Way with Man, have argued, in 
marked opposition to the current tendency 
of New Testament criticism as a whole, 
and yet not altogether unconvincingly 
(though I think, indeed, that at best they 
will be held to have over-stated their case), 
that the references to Divine justice and 
anger and punishment in the Synoptic 
Gospels formed no part of the original 
teaching of Jesus, but are to be taken 
rather as reflecting the religious temper of 
the early Christian community. On this 
very controversial question I will make no 
pronouncement, but will only call your 
attention to the fact that in our own day 
there has been much searching of heart as 
to the supposed educative and disciplinary 
value of punishment. The old maxim 


190 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


GEESE istig we 


‘Spare the rod and spoil the child” is | 
coming to be more and more questioned ; 
and the new movements towards prison-- 
reform are pointing in the same direction. 
The question becomes ever more insistent 
how far, if love be wise, it really will punish. 
Now there is no doubt at all that a 
question of this sort is suggested by some 
things in the teaching of Jesus, and there 
is as little doubt that it is to the spirit and 
influence of Jesus that these present 
searchings of heart go back, rightly or 
wrongly, for their initial inspiration. It 
is quite plain that one of Jesus’ most 
profound convictions—I would say also, 
one of His greatest discoveries—was that 
love and forgiveness have more power to 
constrain, to win, and to educate, than 
have anger and retribution. “ Tell me, 
therefore, which of them will love him 
most? Simon answered and said, I 
suppose it will be the one to whom he 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS IQI 


forgave most. And he said unto him, 
Thou hast rightly judged.’’* Whether 
this implies the ultimate supersession of 
the idea of punishment is another and 
much more difficult question ; but let me 
remind you of a very remarkable old poem 
called Discipline by George Herbert. 


“ Throw away thy rod, 
Throw away thy wrath : 
O my God, 
Take the gentle path. . . 


Then let wrath remove ; 

Love will do the deed : 
For with love 

Stonie hearts will bleed. 


Love is swift of foot ; 

Love’s a man of warre, 
And can shoot, 

And can hit from farre. 


Who can ’scape his bow ? 
That which wrought on thee, 
Brought thee low, 
Needs must work on me. 
1 Luke, vii, 42-43. 


192 #THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


Throw away thy rod ; 

Though man frailties hath, 
Thou art God: 

Throw away thy wrath.” 


And I would commend at least to your 
careful attention Miss Dougall’s chapter 
entitled. ‘‘ Beyond Justice’”’ in her last 
little book. ‘‘ The time has come,” she 
argues, “‘ when we must ask if we can serve 
the two masters—deified law and deified 
grace, supreme justice and supreme 
mercy.” + Put to yourselves the question — 
whether there is or is not present in the 
ethical teaching of Jesus an element which 
is destined in the end to supersede the 
whole machinery of justice and of law. 
Ask yourselves also whether in the highest — 
thought and the best literature of the 
present day, especially since the War, 
there is not a very distinct groping in the 
same direction. I will give you one random 


1 God’s Way with Man, p. 115. 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 193 


example. In Mr. Galsworthy’s recent novel 
The White Monkey, there is a young man 
called Wilfrid Desert who has come through 
four years of trench warfare, and who thus 
describes the effect it has had on him : 


“Tllusion is off. No religion and 
no philosophy will satisfy me—words, 
all words. I have still my senses— 
no thanks to them ; am still capable— 
I find—of passion; can still grit my 
teeth and grin ; have still some feeling 
of trench loyalty, but whether real 
or just a complex, I don’t know.” 


In one scene we find him pleading with the 
head of his firm for the forgiveness of a 
workman who had done some wrong. The 
head defends his action in dismissing the 
man. | 


feredon t think it’s hard,” said. Mr. 
Danby, “ only just.” 
“ Are you a judge of justice ? ”’ 


194 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


ac OpesO 
“Try four years’ hell, and have 
another go.” 


And a little later : 


“We simply couldn’t conduct our 
business, my dear young man, without 
scrupulous honesty in everybody. To 
make no distinction between honesty 
and dishonesty would be quite unfair. 

. Let us put it that there are rules 
of the game which must be observed, 
if society is to function at all.” 

Desert smiled, ‘Oh, hang rules! 
Do it'as'a favour). + 

“T should only be too glad, but it’s 
a matter—well, of conscience, if you 
Ne a 


And outside the door, Desert greets his 
waiting friend with the words: 


“No go. The old blighter’s too 
just.”’ 


It is not my purpose to pronounce upon 
the difficult and momentous ethical 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 195 


questions that. are here involved. Indeed 
I am unable to pronounce upon them, for 
my mind is by no means fully made up 
about them. What I would emphasise is 
only that here, as everywhere, the settle- 
ment of the ethical issue must bring in its 
wake the settlement of the religious issue 
too. Jf love is destined in any sense to 
supersede legal justice in our human affairs, 
and zf the infliction of pain is no longer to 
be regarded as a legitimate and effective 
instrument of human love, then Miss 
Dougall is right and we must extrude all 
ideas of punishment, and of legal and 
retributive justice from our thought of the 
Most High. For the one secret of true 
religious thinking is to hold at all costs to 
what Professor Pringle-Pattison has called 
“the principle of interpretation by the 
highest we know.” ! 


1 The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy, 
Pp. 340. 


196 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


VI 

I have now done my best to put before you 
what I believe to be the gist of the Christian 
teaching. Yet I think you will all feel that, 
if I stopped here, there would be something 
seriously lacking from my exposition— 
something-which, though it has all the time 
been coming within our sight, I have not 
yet sufficiently and expressly insisted upon. 
For there is no doubt at all that the 
crowning glory of the Christian religion 
is that it is not mere teaching, or mere talk, 
or mere words of any sort, but that in it the 
Word was made flesh. We preachers and 
teachers often wonder, do we not, how 
much good we do to men by everlastingly 
talking at their heads? In some ways 
what is wrong with the world is not that 
there is too little teaching in it, but that 
there is too much—too many winds of 
doctrine, too many floating and insubstan- 
tial opinions that lack the backing of actual 


ee a eS 





WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 197 


embodiment in.a living example. For it 
is never mere teaching that saves men. 
“The whole history of religion,’’ writes one 
of the foremost modern students of it, 
C. P. Tiele, ““ proves that the Word must 
always become flesh in order to gain 
admission to the human heart.” ! So it 
is a quite indisputable historical fact that 
it is even more in what He was than in 
what He said that the significance of Jesus 
lies. In the sphere of morals, His example 
has been even more powerful than His 
teaching. In the sphere of faith, the God 
revealed in Himself has meant even more 
to men than the God revealed in His words. 
It is true, certainly, that it is difficult to 
find any teaching anywhere in which faith 
in God is recommended with quite so strong 
a note of joyful self-abandonment as it is 
in the teaching of Jesus; but more notable 
even than the faith He taught is the faith 


1 Elements of the Science of Religion, Vol. II, p. 254. 


198 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


He displayed ; and more notable and vital 
still is the power that was, and still quite 
apparently is, in that faith to call forth 
faith in others. It is true, again, that the 
doctrine that God is Love is nowhere put 
forward so clearly and unequivocally as in 
the Christian teaching; but no good 
historian can deny that, even more than to 
the possession of this teaching, Christianity 
has owed its power to its possession of a 
Lord and Master in Whom the love of God 
was manifest—in Whom, as we read in one 
of the Pastoral Epistles, “‘ the kindness and 
love of God our Saviour toward man 
appeared.’’ The New Testament declaration 
is not merely that Jesus taught men a 
truer doctrine about God than had ever 
been taught before, but that in Jesus God 
came nearer to man than He had ever 
before come. In the character and person 
of Jesus, in His life and in His death, even ~ 
more than in all that He said, men felt 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 199 


that the face of God was made plain and 
the love of God revealed. It is remarkable, 
for instance,—remarkable, and also, as I 
think, instructive, if only we are careful to 
draw the right lesson from it—how few are 
the references in St. Paul’s writings to 
anything that Jesus said in comparison with 
his references to what He was. Nay 
more, it is not even what He was that 
seems to have meant most to St. Paul, but 
rather what God was in Him, what He 
revealed God to be. When St. Paul tells the 
Corinthians that “‘ God was in Christ,” ! 
when he tells the Colossians that Jesus is 
“the portrait of the Unseen God,” ? it is 
not a discovery about Jesus that he is 
announcing so much as a discovery about 
God. “ God proves his love for us by this, 
that Christ died for us,’ he writes in 
Romans. It is a thought of which the New 


1 TI Corinthians, v. 19. 


2 Colossians, i, 15. 


200 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


Testament is full, and is indeed its central — 
theme. “In this,” says another writer, 
“was manifested the love of God toward us © 

. . Herein is love, not that we loved God, ~ 
but that he loved us, and sent hisSon .. .” 
Dean Inge is right when he says that what 
Jesus came to teach was ‘‘not that He was ~ 
like God, but that God was like Himself.’”! 

I am sure that, if we understand it 
properly, there is nothing that need puzzle 
or mystify us, though there is much to call 
forth our reverent wonder and praise, in 
this great significance that is attached in 
Christianity to the person of its founder, 
After all, what else have I been saying 
throughout these chapters but that it is 
in our values that God is revealed to us? 
And values are not, surely, abstract entities 
which can exist apart from living person- 
alities. A value, indeed, only becomes 
valuable when it becomes incarnated in 
a personal being. Hence it) is) mou 


1 Outspoken Essays, Second Series, p. 49. 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 201 


abstract nouns like love and mercy and 
| pity and self-sacrifice that God comes near 
to us, and reveals himself to our hearts, 
but in loving and merciful and unselfish 
persons. “ Man,’ says Chrysostom, “is 
the true Shekinah.” “ There are as many 
theophanies,” says John Scotus Erigena, 
“as there are saintly souls.’”’? Why then 
should we think it strange when 
Christianity bids us find God, not in the 
distant interstellar spaces, nor in those 
mysterious signs and omens dear to the 
hearts of the old diviners, nor yet in the 
ways of nature as revealed by modern 
science, but in the soul of One Who dwelt 
among us, full of grace and truth ? 

When Jesus wished to make manifest 
to men the redemptive love of God, He 
invented the story of the Prodigal Son, 
and it is, I suppose, the most beautiful 
story that has ever been invented by 


1 De Divisione Naturae, I, 8. 


202 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 








anybody. Yet we must not forget that 
behind the story told, and giving reality 
and conviction to the telling of it, there 
was the character and the life of the Teller. 4 
As Wilhelm Herrmann used to say, “‘ Jesus 7 
did not write the story of the Prodigal Son 
on a sheet of paper for men who knew : 
nothing of Himself.”+ Hi He hadjeam 
would no doubt have been forgotten long 
ago. In truth there is for us another story — 
that is more wonderful still, a story stranger 7 
and more beautiful than any fiction, and — 
yet one which Jesus Himself could not 

fully tell, because the first chapters of it 
were only being enacted as He spoke. 

But when, a few years afterwards, Peter 

and Paul and John went about in their 

turn to prove that same redemptive ; 
love of God to the men of their own 

day, they were able to preach to them 


1 See Communion with God, English translation, Revised 
Edition, p. 132, 


WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS 203 


a better sermon and to announce to them 
a fuller Christianity than even the Master 
Himself had been able to do; for instead 
of telling them the parable of the Prodigal 
Son, they could now tell them the history 
of the Passion of Christ. 

And so a final truth emerges. For just 
as it is true that Christianity had its origin, 
not in an abstract system of doctrine and 
code of morals, but in a living Person ; 
and just as it is true that what gives 
continuity to our tortuous Christian history 
as a whole is much rather its constant 
reference to that living Person than the 
persistence within it of any unchanged 
body of teaching or of practice ; so in this 
latter day it is true that what makes a man 
a Christian is neither his intellectual 
acceptance of certain ideas nor his con- 
formity to a certain rule but his possession 
of a certain Spirit and his participation in 
a certain Life. To be a Christian, as we 





204 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


cannot too often remind ourselves, is not 
merely to think this and the other, nor is. 
it merely to do this and to leave the other 
undone; it is rather to have living and | 
personal experience of the fellowship of 
Christian love. It is to be rooted and 
grounded in agapé. It is to know, with all 
the saints of all the ages, something of the 
breadth and length and depth and height 
of the love that was in the heart of Christ 

and, illumined and strengthened by that | 
knowledge, to place all our reliance upon 

the love of God and be filled with all His 

fulness. 


CHAPIER V 
HOW FAITH ARISES IN THE SOUL 


I 


I propose that in this last chapter we 
address ourselves especially to the needs 
of those who have difficulty about the 
acceptance of religious belief. That these 
form a large class by themselves in our 
modern world none of you will be disposed 
to deny. There are many who will tell 
you frankly that they are entirely without 
religious belief. There are many more 
who will tell you that, though they have 
some disposition to believe, they never- 
theless lack the full assurance of faith. 
There are others who say that they believe 
in God, but that His bare existence is about 
all they do believe in ; and still others who 


205 








206 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


say that, though firmly convinced of the 
general truth of religion in the broadest. 
sense, they are yet dubious about the 
special truth of Christianity. I hope that 
the last two chapters have done something . 
to meet most of the problems that are here . 
suggested, but there is one difficulty 
that is still likely to be pressed. I can 
imagine some troubled seeker saying to 
us: ‘I see now what religion is, but I do. 
not see why I am to believe it to be true. 
You have shown me that religion is essen- | 
tially a faith in the revelatory character of 
our values, but you have not shown me 
how I am to get that faith.” This is the 
question which we must now set ourselves 
to answer. 

In trying to answer it we must, I think, 
take nothing for granted, but must begin 
at the very beginning. That is to say, 
we must begin by putting to the inquirers 
this very basic counter-question: Have 


HOW FAITH ARISES 207 


you a firm grip upon your values 
themselves? For that, after all, is the 
first vital point. As has been well said 
(by Professor Cairns), faith ‘ proceeds 
first by gettingits moral values right. . . . 
Until a man recognises the nature and 
authority of the moral imperative, he has 
simply not got the actual facts of his world- 
problem before him.’’! There is no use 
at all (as, indeed, preachers have in every 
age known) in attempting to bring home 
the evidence of religious truth to a man 
whose hold upon goodness and love and 
honour is in any wise loose. How can 
a man expect to know whether or not 
these things bear upon them the marks 
of being ultimate realities, if he does not 
properly and experimentally know what 
they are, or if he allows any kind of moral 
scepticism or indifferentism to blur his 
clear awareness of their claim? How can 


1 The Reasonableness of the Christian Faith, p. 83. 


208 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


a man who refuses to look Duty in the face 
ever hope to find God ? 

It will perhaps be objected that Duty 
is not after all so clear and luminous a 
thing as we are trying to make out. It is 
often very difficult to know what we ought 
to do, or to distinguish right from wrong. — 
Besides, it will be said, there is no 
unanimity in the world about the principles 
of morality but, on the contrary, much 
diversity of opinion. The Hindus lately 
thought it a pious duty to burn widows on 
the funeral pyre of their deceased husbands, 
whereas to us Westerners such a practice 
seemed nothing less than murder. We think 
monogamy to be a fundamental moral 
principle, but many races practise polygamy — 
with the clearest conscience in the world. 
The fact is, our objectors will proceed, 
that moral ideas have had a natural history 
like all other ideas. They have grown up 
in the course of evolution; and where 


HOW FAITH ARISES 209 


the course of evolution has been different, 
ethical standards have been different too. 

Now I do not doubt that most of these 
statements have much truth in them; 
but their truth is, at best, one-sided and 
is at all events largely irrelevant to the 
point I am here desirous of making. No 
matter what anybody may say about the 
difficulty of certain moral problems or the 
relativity of certain moral standards, I 
am prepared to lay it down that there is 
nothing in life of which we are more 
certain than we are of the broad outline 
of our duty. The certainty which attaches 
to our primary moral values is the greatest 
degree of certainty which it is given to 
the race of man to possess. Loyalty and 
love and honour; truthfulness and purity 
and unselfishness—there is no knowledge 
of which I am surer than the knowledge 
that these things are more to be sought 
than fine gold and that there is laid upon 


P 


210 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


me an absolute obligation to seek them, 
no matter at what cost to my own comfort 
or my own private pleasure and _ profit. 
Indeed I should myself be inclined to go 
further and to say that there is no other 
knowledge of which we are even so sure. 
That, at any rate, is the fundamental 
contention of Kant’s philosophy—that in 
our consciousness of moral value, and in 
the sense of absolute obligation attaching 
to such value, we come nearer to the 
Absolute, and nearer also to absolute 
certainty, than we do in any other region 
of our experience. And Plato would have 
said just the same; he would have said 
that in our knowledge of the Good we are 
nearer the bed-rock of reality, and of 
absolute certainty, than we are in our 
knowledge of the external world as present 
to the senses. And I think that, without 
being philosophers, the men of our armies 
(of whom I spoke so much in the first of 


HOW FAITH ARISES Zt 


these chapters) were conscious, and we are 
all conscious, of very much the same 
thing. We feel that, however difficult 
it is to know what to believe, there is 
always something which we know beyond 
all doubt to be worth doing. The search 
for the truth about the System of things 
in which we find ourselves enmeshed is 
long and arduous and has its moments of 
real despair. Science tells us some things 
about it, but scientific results are always 
of a provisional kind and may be to-morrow 
overthrown, and besides, they concern 
only the detailed machinery of the System 
and never its final purpose and meaning ; 
as has been said, “science can know 
nothing of the whole of anything, still 
less of the whole of all things.’’ So we are 
often inclined to cry with Matthew Arnold 
and the whole nineteenth century that 


¢¢ 


we are here as on a darkling 
plain 


212 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


Swept with confused alarms of struggle 
and flight, 

Where ignorant armies clash by 
night.” 1 


But there is always one gleam of light 
which penetrates that darkness—the light 
of love. When the night of doubt and of 
confusion is at its blackest, the values of 
right and noble conduct still stand firm. 
Here is something which no night of 
doubt can make doubtful. Here is the 
one thing which, if our evidence is at all 
reliable, the average man in the trenches 
seemed incapable of doubting. I may 
be in the direst uncertainty about the 
“scheme of things entire,” 


¢ 


nature of this 
about its constitution and construction, 
about its origin and destined end; but 
I know that love is better than hate, that 
courage is better than cowardice and 
honour than treachery, and that it is 


1 Dover Beach; 


HOW FAITH ARISES 213 


right to help one’s fellow-traveller out of 
the ditch and to pour oil and wine into 
his wounds. There may be little to know, 
and little assurance in the knowing of it, 
but there is always plenty to do and, for 
the man who looks it straight in the face, 
plenty of assurance that it is worth doing. 
Do you remember Thomas Carlyle’s famous 
advice to doubters ? 


“Let him who gropes painfully in 
darkness or uncertain light, and prays 
vehemently that the dawn may ripen 
into day, lay this other precept well to 
heart, which to me was of invaluable 
service: ‘Do the Duty which les 
nearest thee,’ which thou knowest to 
be a Duty! Thy second Duty will 
already have become clearer.”’ 1 


We are told in the biography of the greatest 
of nineteenth-century preachers, Frederick 
Robertson of Brighton, that when his 


1 Sartor Resartus, ‘‘ The Everlasting Yea.” 


214 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


night of doubt was at its blackest, when 
in respect of everything else he was left 
with nothing but ‘an awful desolate 


, 


Perhaps,’ one certainty still remained to 
him—the certainty that, as he put it, 
“it must be right to do right.” Surely 
we have here a firm standing-ground on 
which it is ever possible for us to fall back. 
Surely in love and loyalty, in righteousness 
and honour, in chivalry and unselfishness, 
we have an unshifting platform on which 
all good men may meet, doubters of every 
degree, believers of every communion. On 
these, as on a sure foundation, our common 
life is built, our society and all its standards, 
our international experiments and all their 
promise. 


II 


Now I have been at so great pains to 
emphasise the security of our common 


HOW FAITH ARISES 215 


values and the absolute nature of our 
primary moral certainties, just because 
I am so sure that it is out of these 
values and certainties that faith in God 
alone arises in the soul. It is always, if 
I might so put it, in the context of duty 
and of goodness that religious conviction 
comes. It is never possible for a man 
to have a firmer hold upon God than he 
has upon duty. It is never possible for 
a man to be any surer of the reality of 
God than he is of the loveliness of love 
and the ugliness of falsehood and selfishness. 
The only assurance of God which religion 
ever promises is an assurance which is of 
the same kind, of the same texture, as our 
assurance of our ultimate values. But 
if that kind of assurance is enough for us— 
and which of us could ask a better ?>— 
then there does seem good hope that by 
being faithful to our values we can really 
attain to it. 


216 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


The New Testament, at all events, holds 
out this hope to us in the most confident 
way. Though the fact has not always 
received the attention it deserves, yet 
nothing could really be clearer than that 
it is always the moral conditions of belief 
that are emphasised in the New Testament 
rather than the intellectual ones. This 
is not to say that there ave no intellectual 
conditions of faith. Of course there are: 
for obviously no being who was not gifted 
with a rational nature could rise to faith 
in God. For that matter a man cannot 
be even a moral agent unless he is gifted 
with at least ordinary intelligence. But 
the point is rather that the process of 
thought from which faith emerges is intel- 
lectually of so simple a character as to be 
within the reach of the most ordinary under- 
standing if only it has in its firm possession 
the moral premises from which to set out. 
So the vision of God is never promised by 


HOW FAITH ARISES 217 


Jesus or His New Testament followers to 
the clever or the learned, but always and only 
to those who are pure and true and simple 
of heart. The assurance of God’s accom- 
panying love is not put forward as the 
fruit of erudite investigation, but as the 
fruit of moral earnestness and loyalty. 
“ Blessed are the pure in heart,” said 
Wesus, “for they shall see God.” “If 
thine eye be single,’ He said again, “ thy 
whole body shall be full of light. But if 
thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be 
full of darkness.”’ “‘ I praise thee, Father,” 
so ran one of His prayers, *‘ for hiding 
all this from the wise and learned and 
revealing it to the simple-minded.” ! “And 
the Jews marvelled,’ we read in the 
Fourth Gospel, “saying, How knoweth 
this man letters, having never learned ? 
Jesus answered them, and said, My doctrine 
is not mine, but his that sent me. If any 


1 Moffatt’s translation of Matthew, xi, 25. 


218 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


man will to do his will, he shall know of © 
the doctrine, whether it be of God or 
whether I speak of myself.” ‘“‘A good 
conscience,’ we read in one of the Epistles, 
‘““which some having put away concerning 
faith have made shipwreck.’’ “ Holiness,” 
we read in another, “‘ without which no 
man shall see the Lord.” ‘‘ Whosoever 
sinneth,” we read in the Furst Epistle 
of John, ‘‘hath not seen him, neither 
know Him.’ And again, “ He ‘that 
loveth not knoweth not God; for God 
isi Jove.”’.» And finally; ‘Lf tive meee 
one another, God dwelleth in us.” — 
Everywhere in these writings faith is a 
possession, not of the sharp-witted and 
the clear-headed, but of the true-hearted 
and loyal. Its closest associates are always 
a pure heart and a good conscience. 

It is true that to our very great loss and 
confusion this aspect of New Testament 
teaching has frequently been lost sight of 


HOW FAITH ARISES 219 


within the Christian Church, the moral 
conditions of belief being almost entirely 
forgotten and purely intellectual conditions 
put in their place. But here the mystics 
have done good service by raising their 
voice in ceaseless protest. In his fine 
book on Christian Mysticism Dean Inge 
enumerates four propositions which he 
believes to be the four fundamental tenets 
of all mysticism. With the first two we 
are not here concerned; but the third is 
that “‘ without holiness no man may see 
the Lord ’’; and the fourth is that “ our 
guide on the upward path, the true 
hierophant of the mysteries of God, is 
love.’ ! The Protestant Reformation, at 
least as originally represented in Luther, 
stood in no small part for a re-discovery 
of this same truth. And a new and 
stronger emphasis on it was the very 
main-spring of the Ritschlian movement 


1 Christian Mysticism, pp. 6-8. 


220 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


in Germany. A famous English re-— 
discovery of it was in Robertson of 
Brighton’s preaching, and especially in 
his celebrated sermon on “ Obedience as 
the Organ of Spiritual Knowledge.” In> 
the final paragraph of that sermon he 
draws a vivid word-picture of the state of ) 
an honest man’s mind when all certainty 
seems to be dissolved into an “‘ awful, 
desolate Perhaps,’’ and then he closes 
thus : 


“In such an hour what remains? 
I reply, Obedience. Leave those 
thoughts for the present. Act—be 
merciful and gentle—honest: force 
yourself to abound in little services: 
try to do good to others: be true to 
the Duty that you know. That must be 
right, whatever else is uncertain, And 
by all the laws of the human heart, — 
by the word of God, you shall not be 
left in doubt. Do that much of the 
will of God which is plain to you, 


HOW FAITH ARISES 221 


and ‘ You shall know of the doctrine 
whether it be of God.’ ”’ 4 


Ill 


But now let us take a step further and 
try to understand how this can be. How 
can our powers of discernment be thus 
dependent upon our sense of duty? How 
can faith in God thus be a natural accom- 
paniment of loyalty to our values? 

The answer is that faith in God naturally 
accompanies such loyalty because it is 
a thing that is itself very closely akin to 
it. Indeed we may say that to believe in 
duty and to believe in God are not, for 
the man of faith, two different beliefs, but 
only one belief. To believe in God is, at 
least in its beginnings, hardly more than 
a deeper way of believing in duty. What 
happens is simply that to the seeker, in 


1 Seymons, Vol. II, p. 105. 


222 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


the course of his loyal striving to do the 
right and eschew the wrong, and to do 
“the utmost for the highest,’ there comes 
—sometimes with the light of a sudden 
revelation, but more often slowly and 
gradually—the realisation of a new and 
deeper meaning that there is in duty and — 
goodness. He has been believing all along 
that goodness and love and honour are 
the things that matter most in all the world, 
and he has been seeking these things 
with a single-hearted devotedness. But 
now there grows up in his mind something © 
like a conviction that these things are the | 
very pillars on which the world is built. | 
For how could they matter as they do, if 
they be not central to the System of 
Things in which he has his humble part — 
to play? All along he has been believing — 
that there is laid upon him an absolute © 
obligation to do what is right and to follow — 
the narrow and difficult way of duty and © 


HOW FAITH ARISES 223 


of selfless service. But now he comes to 
feel, in a clear and explicit way, that it is 
nothing less than the hidden nature of 
things that is laying this obligation upon 
him. For how can he be obliged to do 
the right if, in the last resort, the Universe 
does not care whether he do the right or 
the wrong? “I must seek the highest,” 
he says, and there is nothing of which he - 
is more sure; but whence can that must 
derive, if not from the nature of things ? 
Why must he, if he be part and parcel of 
a System for which the highest is as the 
lowest and the lowest as the highest ? 

I do not mean to suggest, of course, 
that the ordinary man in whose soul faith 
comes to birth ever asks himself these 
questions in a self-conscious way. What 
actually happens in the large majority 
of cases is no doubt simply that, without 
his knowing it, duty begins to wear a new 
aspect to him and to acquire a new 


224 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


an eee 


significance. Perhaps, most of all, it is — 


a sense of the purpose of things that comes 
to him. He begins to feel that he was 
meant to seek the highest, that to this end 
was he born; and above all there grows 
upon him the feeling that in seeking it 


he is fulfilling his appointed destiny and — 


putting himself in line with Something 
greater than himself. The truth is that 
no man to whom there comes the strong 


sense that in doing his duty he is doing — 


what is required of him is far from the 
true faith. Was not the very nerve-centre 
of the faith of Jesus Christ Himself just 
this sense of Higher Appointment that 
accompanied Him in all His work; the 
sense of being sent; the sense that, in 
doing what He had to do, He was doing 
the will of Him that sent Him? Such 
a sense is the most blessed accompani- 
ment to which any man can _ work. 
Perhaps it is a thing that comes, in some 


HOW FAITH ARISES 225 


measure, and sooner or later, to all good 
workmen. And it is what we mean by 
faith in God. 

Sometimes it seems to come impercept- 
ibly and as with noiseless feet. Sometimes 
what happens is not so much that a man 
begins to believe as that he begins to 
realise he has been believing all the time. 
He has all along believed in the absolute 
worth-whileness of righteousness and love 
and service; he has all along felt that he 
was in the world to seek these things and 
that, if he did not seek them, he would 
be missing his destined end and be, in some 
sort, a disappointment, not merely to 
himself and to his fellows, but somehow 
also to That which caused him and his 
fellows to be. And now, it comes to him, 
perhaps with sudden surprise, that this 
belief is religion. 

Of course, I am dealing here with a 


particular kind of man—with the man who 
Q 


226 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


sets out without any conscious religious 
belief at all or who, having been brought 
up in such a belief, has afterwards entirely 
lost it; and Iam trying to trace the way in 
which faith makes a new _ beginning 
within him. But I am far from meaning to 
suggest that this kind of case is the normal 
one. On the contrary, the normal order 
of things is undoubtedly that our values 
should come to us from the beginning in 
a religious dress, and Duty as the “ Stern 
Daughter of the Voice of Godi’”)) Tie 
attempt to regard the moral law as 
expressive merely of human and utilitarian 
preferences, or as reflecting purely human 
arrangements, is very far from being either 
natural or primitive to the human race. 
Mankind as a whole was not moral before 
it was religious, but from the beginning 
regarded its moral standards as being in 
some deep sense rooted in the real order 
of things; and the same is normally true 


HOW FAITH ARISES ao] 


of the individual also. What we call 
“mere morality” is but a latter-day 
abstraction, and it is an abstraction which 
has never yet shown itself to possess any 
social stability. Where no_ disturbing 
influence enters in, our knowledge of good 
and evil is naturally, and without further 
ado, taken by us to be a knowledge of the 
ultimate principles of the constitution of 
the System to which we belong. 


IV 


Now there is one question which is sure 
to be asked of us at this point. We are 
sure to be asked whether it is possible to 
express this conviction that we have of 
the deep grounding of our values, in the 
form of a valid, logical proof. Can we 
construct a really watertight argument to 
show that our moral consciousness bears 
credible witness to the real nature of things ? 


228 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


My answer to this question has two sides to it. 
On the one hand, I have no doubt at all that 
such an argument can be constructed, and — 
perhaps without very great difficulty; for 
religious faith is as much a product of 
our rational natures as anything else is. 
It is true that the first attempt made in 
this direction, that of Kant himself, was 
far from being a successful one; but the 
same can by no means be said of a recent 
book like Professor Sorley’s Moral Values 
and the Idea of God. On the other 
hand, I have the very gravest doubts as 
to the effectiveness of such a formal 
argument, when taken by itself. It may 
indeed have a negative effectiveness in 
clearing away certain artificial hindrances 
to belief, and especially certain intellectual 
cobwebs woven by modern positivist 
philosophers ; but it is difficult to think 
that any mere argument could ever directly 
bring faith in God to birth in a man’s soul. 


HOW FAITH ARISES 229 


Perhaps it is true that we are coming more 
and more to doubt the value of formal 
argumentation of any kind, and to wonder 
how many people have ever really been 
led to embrace a new view of things as the 
result of debate. It is the experience of 
life that changes a man’s outlook, and not 
the discovery of a well-turned syllogism. 
Argument is at its strongest in pure 
mathematics, and in mathematical physics, 
and in statistics, and in regions where 
experimental methods of induction can be 
applied ; but in the region of art and morals 
and religion, and in all regions where we 
are concerned with sensitiveness to fine 
gradations of value, its effectiveness is 
much more open to question. There is no 
good in trying to argue with a man who tells 
you that Martin Tupper’s poetry is better 
than Milton’s or that Sankey’s tunes are 
as good as Bach’s. There is no good in 
hurling syllogisms at a man who tells you 


230 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


that he sees nothing mean in kicking his 
fellow when he is down and nothing noble 
in self-sacrifice. Valid enough arguments 
can no doubt be constructed to prove that 
he is wrong; but it is not argument, nor 
talk of any sort, that is likely to persuade 
him of his error, but only things like 
personal influence and deeper experience 
and the hard contact with life. It is the 
same with religious belief ; and I think that 
if we look at the matter closely, we can 
see why this should be so. For if we are 
right in believing that it is out of our 
consciousness of value that religious belief 
arises, then every proper and_ valid 
argument for religious belief must have 
as its major premise the awareness of some 
moral value. It must always be an 
argument from the beauty and the claim 
of goodness to the reality of Eternal 
Goodness, and from the loveliness of love 
to the Love of God. And that being so, we 


HOW FAITH ARISES 231 


can readily understand how all such argu- 
ments produce conviction upon us only in 
proportion to our appreciation of the values 
upon which theyrest. Religion is essentially 
a matter of finding a deeper meaning in 
duty, a deeper and more prophetic signi- 
ficance in our values; and it is not by 
sitting still and regarding them in idle 
contemplation, or by bringing to bear upon 
them a greater logical acumen than we 
had previously done, that we shall become 
more firmly persuaded of this meaning 
and significance, but by doing them and 
living them. The process of reasoning 
by which faith rises to the thought of God, 
which is the same as to say the path which 
leads from our values to reality, is so 
simple and direct that no man has ever 
been prevented from finding it by slowness of 
wits or deficiency of logical power, but rather 
by too much logic of a false and abstract 
kind or else by something lacking from 


232 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


his living experience. Intuitive insight will 
here always precede formal proof, and where 
there is as yet no such insight, formal 
proof is likely to be powerless to convince. 
In a word, everything depends, not upon 
the rigour of our logic, but upon the depth 
and the vigour and the richness of our 
practical acquaintance with the realities 
from which our logic starts. Here is a 
fine passage from a published letter by 
the late Baron von MHiigel on The 
Preliminaries to Religious Belief : 


“We get to know such realities, 
slowly, laboriously, intermittently, 
partially ; we get to know them, not 
inevitably nor altogether apart from 
our dispositions, but only if we are 
sufficiently awake to care to know 
them, sufficiently humble to welcome 
them, and sufficiently generous to pay 
the price continuously which is strictly 
necessary if this knowledge and love are 
not to shrink but to grow. We indeed 





HOW FAITH ARISES 233 


get to know realities in proportion as 
we become worthy to know them,—in 
proportion as we become less self- 
occupied, less_ self-centred, more 
outward-moving, less obstinate and 
insistent, more gladly lost in the crowd, 
more rich in giving all we have, and 
especially all we are, our very selves.”’ 1 


And yet, after all, argument has its 
uses even in so deep-lying and elemental 
a sphere as this. Perhaps I have already 
sufficiently indicated the form which I 
think such argument should take. It 
should consist simply in the attempt to 
bring to clear consciousness, and to express 
in precise language, the nature of the 
compulsion which in every age has led 
earnest seekers after righteousness to trust 
in an Eternal Righteousness, and has 
inspired devoted workers to believe that 
thay are working for a more-than-human 


1 Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion, 
p. 104. 


234 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


Cause. It is agreed that my consciousness 
of my highest practical values is accom- 
panied by a clear recognition of their 
claim upon my allegiance. It is agreed 
that there is nothing of which I am more 
certain than that an absolute obligation 
is laid upon me to do the right and eschew 
the wrong. But what is it that thus 
obliges me, if it be not some larger order 
of things to which I stand related? How 
can values like truthfulness and unselfish- 
ness and courage have any claim upon me, 
if they are not grounded in the all-enclosing 
System to which I belong ? How can the 
Ultimate Reality demand righteousness 
in me, if Itself be not righteous ? 

Perhaps some modern moralist will say 
that it is not the Ultimate Reality that 
demands righteousness in me, but only 
human society; and that the enclosing 
System, in which my ultimate values are 
grounded and from which my moral 





HOW FAITH ARISES 235 


obligation derives, is not the “ scheme of 
things entire,” but only the human species. 
I hope none of you will object to my 
characterising this as sheer nonsense. 
If it were true, it would mean that society 
itself was under no obligations and was 
conscious of no duty to do, or to require 
of its members, one thing rather than 
another. It would mean that whatever 
society as a whole chose to do or to demand 
was 7pso facto right and good, its standards 
being entirely self-determined. But you 
and I know better than to believe these 
things. We know that society as a whole 
is as truly under obligation to follow the 
one strait path of righteousness as is the 
humblest individual within it. We know 
also that what the individual feels obliged 
to seek is not what society wants, or what 
it arbitrarily decrees, but rather what it 
ought to want, its good. And that means 
that he is conscious of standards that are 


236 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


more than merely social. After all, a , 
man’s final allegiance is not to the — 
particuliar animal species of which he isa — 


member and to its private tastes and 
preferences, but to the Eternal Reality 
upon whose bosom he lies. Consequently 
if you say. to men (as a writer like Mr. 
Bertrand Russell would say to them) that 
while society demands that they be true 
and tender and brave, the ultimate nature 
of things makes no such demand on them 
(being only a blind and brutal hulk of 
inanimate matter), it is a perfectly valid 
answer on their part to say, ‘“ Then we 
prefer the wider allegiance. Society may 
say what it likes, but we shall follow the 
ways of our Almighty Mother. Like her 
we shall not trouble about righteousness 
and truth at all,”’ “That, I say; wou 
bea valid answer. But itis not a statement 
which any man could sincerely and 
unashamedly make, because every man 





— a a i 


HOW FAITH ARISES 237 


knows in his heart that he must trouble 
about righteousness and_ truthfulness, 
whether society demands these things of 
him or no. 

It is, then, on this knowledge, and on 
these intimations of a trans-human reality 
given to us in our knowledge of good and 
evil, that religion builds. Does it seem a 
slender foundation? Does the rich and 
detailed fulness of our Christian assurance 
of God seem out of keeping with its origin 
in one little hint about the meaning of 
things that comes to us in the doing of our 
duty ? Ah, but one little hint may have 
vast implications and lead to endless vistas 
of discernment! It was one little hint 
that came to Archimedes, to Newton, and 
to Einstein. Andifthe one little hint be this 
—that our values are grounded in reality, 
and that our highest values are conse-— 
quently our best clues to the nature of 
reality—then how far can we not go 


238 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


from that beginning? We have already ‘ 
seen how the thought of God is bound ~ 


immediately to arise. The Universe 
cannot demand righteousness and love 
of me, unless Itself be righteous and 
loving ; but how can anything be righteous 
and loving except a living Person? ‘That 
is why, at so early a stage in its history, 
religion made a firm and enduring alliance 
with animism, which is the doctrine that 
behind nature there is Soul. If duty 
mean anything, if conscience be not a 
lying voice, then at the heart of the Universe 
there is Life and Mind and Reason, because 
Goodness and Truth and Love. And that 
is not all ; for as we gain greater insight into 
the ways of love, so we rise to a higher 
and surer discernment of the ways of God. 
Every glimpse we get of a higher value in 
our dealings with one another is at the 
same time a further glimpse into the mind 
of the Most High. The Doctrine of the 





HOW FAITH ARISES 239 


Attributes of God, the Doctrine of 
Providence, the Doctrine of the Forgiveness 
of Sins and the Doctrine of the Immortality 
of the Soul are all based, in the last resort, 
on our practical acquaintance with the 
workings of love in the heart of man. 
But not, thank God, with the workings of 
love in our own hearts as private individuals! 
If it were given to you and me to know no 
more about the ways of Divine Love than 
we can learn from the measure of love that 
we ourselves daily mete to our fellows, I 
fear we might still be in pagan darkness. 
It is from the souls and lives, not of ourselves 
but of others, that most of us have gained 
our highest insight into the meaning of 
love. As I quoted before from a great 
teacher of the Middle Ages, ‘‘ There are 
as many revelations of God as there are 
saintly souls.”’ And for the highest insight 
of all, it is to one soul and life that we must 
still turn—to the soul and to the life of 


240 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


Him Whom to have seen is to have seen j 
the Father. ‘‘ Hereby know we what love © 


is, that he laid down his life for us.’ } 


Perhaps some of you will feel that in — 


talking thus we are seeming to make God 


too remote from human life. Is God, you © 


will ask, merely a reality arrived at by 
inference, and with whom we can have no 
direct acquaintance ? Such an impression 
however, can only have resulted from the 
necessity under which we have here placed 
ourselves of being severely analytic in our 
argument, breaking up the native and 
intuitive assurance of faith into so many 
successive steps of reasoning. The real 
truth is not that man at last concludes 
that his values imply the reality of God, 
but rather that from the beginning he 
finds God in his values. And it is God 
Himself that he finds, and no mere reflection 
of Him. Love is not merely like God, but in 


1 I John, iii, 16. Compare Moffatt’s translation. 





sp = i _ per trlie = mn . a nt - 7 =n " >. a = 
ee ee et ee ee ee Ne fee ee '. ae 


HOW FAITH ARISES 241 


a real sense is God. “ He that loveth not 
knoweth not God; for God 1s love.’ ! 
And so also positively, ‘‘ God is love; and 
he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God 
and God in him.” ? Do you remember 
Matthew Arnold’s paraphrase of Bernard 
of Clairvaux ° 


“*Tis God himself becomes apparent, 
when 

God’s wisdom and God’s goodness 
are displayed, 

For God of these his attributes is 
made.’’ 


There is therefore no more intimate 
communion with God possible or thinkable 
than that which may be ours in the doing 
of our duty and in the pursuit of our 
values. As I have already indicated, I 
take it to be one of the clearest things in 
the teaching of Jesus that communion 


a5 1 fohn, iv, 8: 
2 I John, iv, 16. 
8 From the sonnet entitled ‘‘ The Divinity.” 


242 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


with God is not something separate from 
the doing of our duty but, on the contrary, 
that it is only in the doing of our duty 
that we can commune with Him aright. 
This thought is finely stated by Canon 
Sirecerer!: 


“The worship of God is not 
something different from the love of 
Humanity, the passion for the 
Beautiful, and the devotion to Truth ; 
it is not something which exists along- 
side of these and in addition to them, 
it is what these actually are whenever 
and in so far as they are realised in 
their highest form, in their” true 
co-ordination, and in ‘them “Teal 
meaning. Conscious worship of the 
Divine is not an extra, it is the 
summary and explanation of every 
separate and departmental pursuit of 
onthe Tdealre 


So we are often warned in the New 


1 Concerning Prayer, p. 245. 





PE ae ae ee ae 


HOW FAITH ARISES 243 


Testament against the habit of thinking 
of God as an object that can be immediately 
present to our perception quite independ- 
ently of our values. ‘“‘ No man hath seen 
God at any time. If we love one another, 
God dwelleth in us, and his love is 
perfected in us.” } 

This, indeed, is the deep meaning of the 
Christian Doctrine of the Incarnation. For 
surely it was a true instinct which led the 
Christian Church to insist that it was not 
merely something like God (épo.0tcrs, aS 
they said) which men saw and knew in the 
love of Christ, but God’s very self. When 
au said) that \God was.-in Christ)}> he 
was not using the language of metaphor but 
was literally transcribing our common 
Christian experience. How could God come 
closer to men than He came in the love 
and life and death of Jesus Christ our 
Lord ? 


1 I John, iv. 12. 


244 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 
VI 


We have now come to the end of our © 


discussion, and [I shall try to gather 


together the threads of it in a few concluding — 


remarks. Let me carry you back to what 
was said in the first of these chapters about 
the common man’s philosophy of life, as 
revealed to us on the battlefields of France. 
First, there were those lists, marvellously 
in agreement with one another, of the 
qualities of manhood which the common 
man admires —courage, comradeship, 
straightforwardness, humility, persistent 
cheerfulness, generosity and loyal devotion 
to duty. I think we shall all agree, as we 
look back on such a list as that, that there 
is at least nothing about the common man’s 
values that need keep him away from the 
Christian Church. Then there were those 
indications, supported by a hardly less 
unanimous testimony, of the almost 
inarticulate faith that was with these men 





SS ee ee eee el eee 


Pe. ee ee ee 


HOW FAITH ARISES 245 


through hardship and danger, and did not 
leave them in the hour of death. You will 
remember how one wrote: ‘If we could 
be said to have any philosophy of life at 
all, it would all have been comprehended 
in the one brief rule of doing the right 
thing.’ And you will remember how 
another writer took us a little further into 
the secret: “‘ They declare, by what they 
are and do, that there is a worth-whileness 
in effort and sacrifice. Without saying so, 
they commit themselves to ‘ the Everlasting 


RA ee 


Arms. Or again: “ They only know— 
a wonderful majority of them know—that 
something great and righteous wants them 
and requires of them their help.” 4 
Something great and righteous wants us 
and requires of us our helb—could there be 
a better summary than that of the faith 
that comes to loyal workers, the faith 


that worketh by love, the faith that 


1 References in Chapter I, 


246 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


was in Our Lord Himself? If we have 
learned anything in these chapters about 
the meaning of faith, it is this: that 
it begins by being faith in our work, in our 
duty, in our mission, faith (as Jesus liked 
to put it) that we are “sent’’; and ends 
by being faith in Him Who sent us. And 
surely our study of the outlook of the men 
at the battle-front was enough to convince 
us that every essential seed of this faith was 
present, potentially, in their hearts, and 
in the hearts of all true men. There is, 
moreover, one other element in the soldiers’ 
outlook which seems to lead up in a definite 
way to the full assurance of Christian faith, 
and that is their persistent refusal, even 
in so dire circumstances, to worry about 
the future. ‘“‘ We realise at the Front,” so 
ran one passage which you will remember, 
“that the issues of life and death aren’t in 
our hands. . . . But just because we do 
the only right thing and realise that every- 





HOW FAITH ARISES 247 


thing else is out of our power, there comes 
to us a peace and content. We take the 
one step and trust the rest. . . . It is the 
beginning of the peace of God.”’ Do what's 
up to you and don’t worry—such was the 
sentiment that was always on these men’s 
lips ; and at least two of the writers whom 
I cited in my first chapter comment on its 
fundamental agreement with that word of 
Christ’s which sums up so much of His 
message: Mi} pepiwvare, —‘ Be not troubled,” 
“ Take no thought.” 

The result of our inquiry, then, is a 
recovery of the glad assurance that 
Christianity, when properly understood, is 
an outlook on life which is never very far 
away from the mind and the mood of all 
true-hearted workers. Indeed, if it were 
anything else, it could not be regarded as 
having anything like an unconditional 
claim upon our allegiance ; for I, at least, 
should take it as axiomatic that the only 


248 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


faith which can be required of us, and the 
only faith which it is in any wise blame- 
worthy not to possess, is the faith that is 
born of dutiful devotion to our appointed 
task and unwavering loyalty to our highest 
values—what Tennyson calls the “ faith 
that comes of self-control.” 


Speaking once more of the soldiers’ 


religion, Bishop Neville Talbot says : 
“They have found a purpose to 


which they cleave, something to give © ! 


themselves away for. Only it is hardly 
acknowledged, but rather lies below 
the level of mental apprehension and 
expression.” 


And then he adds finely : 


“It is the function of Christianity 
to raise this unacknowledging trustful- 
ness and self-giving out of dumb 
unconsciousness, and to give it speech, 
and to crown it with the glory of fully 
human self-devotion. It is its part to 
declare that it is God Whom they find 





a Se i ee a eg 


HOW FAITH ARISES 249 


in the offering up of themselves, His 
purpose to which they can cleave, His 
will to be done—and that to give Him 
joy is the supreme end of man.” 


But what now of those who feel them- 
selves unable to rise even to such a faith 
as this? What of those sincere but 
doubting souls who, though prizing all 
things lovely and of good report, and 
abiding steadfastly by the duty they know, 
yet cannot attain to any measure of trust 
in the reality of an Eternal Goodness? 
Well, perhaps the reason why they do not 
find what they are seeking is that they are 
looking for the wrong thing. If part of 
the seeming unfaith that is in the world is 
due to disloyalty and sin, part of it is due 
also to misunderstanding and to confusion 
of thought and to the sophistication 
wrought by false philosophical preconcep- 
tions. Therefore let every true-hearted 


1 Thoughts on Religion at the Front, pp. 27-28. 


250 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 


doubter be of good cheer. Let him 
remember that the children of the Most — 
High are known, not by their opinions, but 
by their fruits. Let him remember that, 
after all, what matters most is to have a 
loving heart and a helping hand. Let him 
remember how it is plainly written for his _ 
special comfort that “ He that loveth his — ; 
brother abideth in the light, and there is _ 
none occasion of stumbling in him.” ! 
And perhaps faith in God will not always 
tarry. Perhaps one day he will find that 
it has come to him unawares. Nay, 
perhaps it is with him even now, though he 
knows it only under some other and poorer 
name ; and then some day the knowledge 
will come to him, with joy and gladness, 
that what he has all along been believing 
in, and resting upon, and living by, is 
nothing less than God’s very Self; and he 
will say of his life what Jacob said of Bethel 


tT John, ti, 10. 





HOW FAITH ARISES 251 


when morning broke, “ Surely the Lord is 
in this place, andI knewitnot; . . . This 
is none other but the house of God, and 
this is the gate of heaven.” 


“Some may perchance, with strange 
surprise, 

Have blundered into Paradise. 
In vasty dusk of life abroad, 
They fondly thought to err from God, 
Nor knew the circle that they trod ; 
And, wandering all the night about, 
Found them at morn where they set 


out. 

Death dawned ; Heaven lay in pros- 
pect wide :— 

Lo! they were standing by His 
Brdertany 


1 Francis Thompson, A Judgment of Heaven, Epilogue 


ple ae Pee Cee y' 
Ru oe 
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INDEX 


Agapé, Ch. IV, passim. 

American Indians, 150. 

Ames, Edward Scribner, 108. 

Archimedes, 237. 

Argument, 228ff. 

Aristotle, 53, 54, 56. 

Army and Religion, The, Ch. I, 
passim. 

Arnold, Matthew, 92f., 115-117, 
BSOf 21 1f., 241. 

Athanasius, 181. 

Augustine, St., 66, 82. 

Australian aborigines, 97, 150. 


Bach, 229. 

Balfour, The Earl of, 130. 
Behmen, 88. 

Berkeley, 72. 

Blackie, J. S., 94. 
Browning, 132f. 

Buddha, 143. 


atis es eincipal DL. o., 7, 20, 
207. 


Carlyle, 213. 

Carpenter, Professor J. Estlin, 
140f. 

Chrysostom, 201. 

Communion with God, 131, 134. 

Comte, Auguste, 105f., 117. 

Conduct, 91ff., 104ff. 


Deists, The, 123. 
Denominationalism, 18ff., 34. 
Dickinson, G. Lowes, 51. 
Dougall, Lily, 189ff. 


Durkheim, Emile, 97, 107f. 
253 


Einstein, 237. 
Emmet, C. W., 189ff. 
Erigena, 201, 239. 


Fatherhood of God, 179ff. 
Feeling, 69ff., 87f. 
Fichte, 127. 
Foakes-Jackson, Professor F. J., 
168, 176, 177n. 
Forgiveness— 
Human, 160ff., 188ff. 
Divine, 173ff., 188ff., 239. 
Francis, St, 66. 
Frommel, Gaston, 128. 


Galsworthy, John, 198f. 
God— 
Attributes of, 182ff., 239. 
Conception of, 133f., 151ff., 
L72ff),-LO7E. 
Existence of, 29, 55, 56, 233f. 
Faith in, Ch. V, passim. 
Goethe, 15l1f. 
Gordon, Rev. Geoffrey, 7. 
Gray), sRéeve GAs iierberta. 7; 
quoted, 8, 10, 15, 29, 34, 40. 
Greek philosophy, 52f. 
» religion, 97, 151. 
»,  tragedians, 145. 


Hankey, Donald, 8; quoted, 25, 
oLae. 

Hebrew religion, 98, 144, 151, 
154, 162, 169f., 177, 181ff. 
Hebrews, Epistle to the, quoted, 

188. 


254 


Herbert, George, 191f. 
Herrmann, Wilhelm, 67, 76, 202. 
Hocking, Professor W. E., 1382. 
H6ffding, Harald, 128f., 132, 152. 
Humanity, Religion of, 105ff. 


Idealism, 62f. 

Immortality, 29, 55, 123f., 239. 

Incarnation, 196-204, 243. 

Indian religion, 151. 

Inge, Dean W. R., 46f., 
145, 200, 219. 


120, 


James, William, 73f., 130. 

Jeremiah, 56. 

Jesus Christ, 30, 41f., 82, 98- 
102, 113-115, Ch. IV, passim, 
207f., 224, 239ff., 246f. 

Johannine literature, quoted, 173, 
200, 218, 240, 241, 243, 250. 

John, St., 159, 202. 


Justice, 161ff., 182ff., 187ff. 


Kant, 109, 123-127, 135f., 210, 
228. 


Lake, Professor Kirsopp, 164, 
168f., 176, 177n. 

Le Roy, 129. 

Logic, 50, 51, 227ff. 

Lotze, Hermann, 127. 

Love, Christian, 102f., Ch. IV, 
passim. 

Luther, 82, 181, 219. 


McGiffert, Dr. A. C., 174f. 

Maclean, Dr. Norman, 7; 
quoted, 9. 

Macnutt, Canon, 7. 

Medieval synthesis, 55, 56f. 

Metaphysics, 49ff., 58ff., 95. 

Middle Ages, 53-56. 


INDEX 4 


Milton, 229. 
Missions, Christian, 37, 149. 
Moffat, Professor James, lOIf., 
177n. B 
Montefiore, Claude, 177. ql 
Morality, O1ff., 104ff., 155-171, 
207ff., 234 ff. 
‘“ Mosaic ’’ Law, 154, 162. yi 
Mystical Theory of Religion, 8]- _ 
84, 85, 88f. 
Mysticism, 82, 88f., 219. 






Natorp, Paul, 109. 

Natural Religion, 29. 
Naturalism, 62f. 

Newman, Cardinal, quoted, 30. 
Newton, 125, 237. 


Paley, 72. 
Parental sentiment, 165f. 
Pascal, 123. 
Pastoral Epistles, 
218. 
Patmore, Coventry, 81ff. 
Paul, St., 66, 82, 102f., 115, 117, 
149, 150, 157, 159, 172, 173, 
i Byte Sh RF Fr 186f,, 199, 202, 243. 
Plato, 53, 56, 72, 120, 122, 210. 
Positive religion, 29. 
Pragmatism, 130. 
Primitive religion, 140f. 
Pringle-Pattison, Professor A. S., ” 
120, 195. 
Prophets, Hebrew, 145. 
Providence, Divine, 133, 239. 
Pseudo-Dionysius, 88. ‘4 
““ Psychology of Religion,” 73. 
Ptolemaic Cosmology, 55 ) 
Punishment, 188ff. 
Pym, Rev. T. W., 7 


quoted, 198, 


Rabbinic literature, 154. 
Rationalism, 48ff., 90. 


INDEX 


Rauwenhoff, L. W. E., 128. 
Reality, 110ff., 221ff., 233f. 
Reformation, Protestant, 2, 219. 
Religion Among American Men, 
Ch. I, passim. 
Religions of the World, 137ff. 
Religions of the World— 
Diversity of, 149-153. 
Unity of, 140-149. 
“ Religious Experience,” 84f. 
“ Religious Sense,’’ 81-84. 
Renaissance, 2. 
Revelation, 54—55, 57, 111, 197ff. 
Ritschl, Albrecht, 127. 
Ritschlian School, 127, 136, 219. 
Robertson, F. W., of Brighton, 
213f., 220f. 
Robertson Smith, W., 98. 
Roman Church, 57. 
Roman Religion, 97, 155. 
Romanticism, 69ff., 90. 
Rousseau, 123. 
Russell, Bertrand, 118f., 236. 


Sabatier, Auguste, 128, 

Sankey’s music, 229. 

Schiller, F. C. S., 130. 

Schleiermacher, 7Off., 87f., 135f. 

Science, Natural, 37ff., 49-52, 
66) 126f., 201, 211. 

sclater, Dr. J. R.P., 7; quoted, 
9 


Scott, Professor E. F., 161f. 
Sentimentality, 75f. 

Shaw, Bernard, 164f. 
Sidgwick, Henry, 155f. 
Socrates, 120. 

Spinoza, 123. 

Streeter, Canon B. H., 242. 
Sorley, Professor W. R., 228. 


255 


Sufis, 88. 
Swedenborg, 88. 
Symbolo-fideists, 128. 


Talbot, Bishop E. S., 7, 20. 
Talbot, Bishop Neville, 7; 
quoted, 27, 28, 29, 245, 248f. 

Tennyson, 248. 

Teresa, Santa, 88. 

Theistic Proofs, 56. 

Thomas Aquinas, St., 56. 

Thompson, Francis, 251. 

Tiele, C. P.; 197. 

Timothy, First Epistle to, quoted, 
103. 

Trinity of God, 55. 

Tupper, Martin, 229. 

Tyrrell, Father George, 130, 142. 


Vaihinger, Hans, 129. 

Value-judgments, 127ff. 

Values, 110ff., 151ff., 166f., 200, 
207ff. 

Vedas, 147. 

von Higel, Baron, 232f. 


War, The Great, Ch. I, passim, 
164f., 192ff., 244-247. 

Ward, Professor James, 78f., 87f. 

Webb, Professor C. C, J., 56. 


Young, Major W. P., 7, 10, 12, 
26, 30, 31, 32, 2465. 


Zend-Avesta, 145, 











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